Brad Scoggin
Well, welcome back to XR Industry Leaders podcast with ArborXR. I am your co-host, Brad Scoggin, the CEO and one of the co-founders of ArborXR along with Will stackable, our CMO and co-founder. And today we have a really interesting episode. We get to sit down with one of the preeminent researchers, in the field of VR, been in the space for over 30 years, and get a story or a sense of the transition from some of the research that’s gone into developing this technology and that transition into actual application. Dr. Skip Rizzo is currently – one of his roles – is director for medical VR at USC. Skip, welcome to the show.
Skip Rizzo
Great to be here.
Brad Scoggin
Well, you’re definitely an OG. And so I’d like to go back to about 2005. I think you said you started in ‘95, but 2005, you launched a project called Brave Mind. maybe you could tell us a little bit about that.
Skip Rizzo
Well, Brave Mind came about due to the urgency of the problem with PTSD and returning service members from Iraq and Afghanistan. The military finally fessed up that this was, in fact, a problem. And so using VR to deliver an evidence-based approach that we call prolonged exposure therapy made a lot of sense. So we had built out an initial prototype in 2003, building off of a game system called Full Spectrum Warrior. And then building out the prototype, shopping around and then getting the attention of people in the military that decided to fund it. Even though VR was very – it was nascent at the time – there was a compelling case of deliver exposure therapy in a controlled stimulus environment, that VR affords. So we built out simulations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and we could put servicemembers with PTSD in these simulations and help them to gradually confront and reprocess the difficult emotional memories of their trauma. The clinician always sort of has a Wizard of Oz control panel where they can systematically control everything that’s going on in the world in real time. So it’s the patient’s narrator in their story. The clinician is mimicking it in the actual simulation that the patient is in. Now, if you don’t know much about PTSD therapy, you might say, why the hell would you do that? Why would you make somebody go back to the scene of the crime? But actually, the science shows that this trauma-focused approach, it really leads to the but the best outcomes if people complete the full spectrum of treatment. It’s hard medicine for a hard problem, but it does work. And so that was where VR was well matched to engage patients in these difficult memories, but at a pace they could also handle. So it was very, very easy in the beginning. First session, you might have somebody sitting in a Humvee by the side of the road just looking out over the desert, talking about their experience. Then as it progressed to therapy, they go through all the steps where, they may confront that event that they lost their best friend in, an IED blown up by the side of the road or whatever the event was. We can mimic that. And so that was 2005, and I’m happy to say that project has continuously evolved to the point now where it’s distributed across the VA. It’s gone through various iterations, and now it’s expanded out to our work with military sexual trauma that we ran a pilot test and showed good outcomes and safe use in that area. And now, we’re working with developers in Ukraine, expanding the content around a Ukrainian context, as well as the initial steps to do that, with Israeli and Gaza type contexts as well.
Will Stackable
It’s such a significant use case. And I share this honor before the call. But part of the origin story for Arbor was, me watching a video. Must have been a CNN clip or something about Brave Mind and sharing it with my parents. And I remember thinking, I’m excited about gaming. It’s awesome, to be in VR and shoot zombies. But this feels like such a significant use case for a technology that you could. There’s no way not no other way to do that. And, I have friends and extended family that are in the military. And so having a little bit of first-hand experience and knowing how difficult it can be to make that transition from a battlefront to normal life. Yeah. It’s such an interesting application. So I’m curious – Brave Mind’s been distributed to over 170 clinical sites over its history. And I know you have a partnership with the Soldier Strong Foundation. Are there any new applications of similar technology you’re seeing that that you could talk about? Is there anything that you feel like, if that was sort of a pioneering initiative, all the way back in 2005, what’s happening now?
Skip Rizzo
Well, in the field of trauma, people have been employing VR, using different approaches. like, for example, helping patients develop mindful skills, mindfulness training. And there’s a number of companies with trip or Magic Horizons, Firefly VR, they’ve developed these virtual worlds that have guided imagery, and it helps a person to calm down, learn how to do tactical breathing for stress management, stuff like that.
Skip Rizzo
There are companies or research groups that are following on to the exposure model, but adding in other things, adding in psycho physiological recording, like biofeedback to help a person manage their physiological reactions to certain stimuli. There’s an application where persons on a treadmill walking while they’re seeing, not an immersive headset, but a big screen in front of them. They’re seeing different battle images or 3D content around their trauma content that they can bring in. This is the work of Mike Roy and Eric Vermette which is showing some promise as well. I mean, the whole point here is to engage a person, and that’s what VR really is all about. We have an emotional engagement engine, if you will, because we can put people in these scenes where, it’s like they’re there. And the research has followed along with all that, and I do want to say that, two big things have happened Brave Mind and, even before that, when we first got involved in the field. And that is number one, the technology’s caught up with the vision. So some of these ideas in the 90s, you could say they were… you could say they’re visionary on one side, or you could say they were harebrained schemes on the other. Because it was just so hard to have the equipment to do it properly. But the technologies caught up with the vision now where it’s always going to get better. But we have sufficient level technology to create these emotionally engaging experiences.
The second thing is the research, very much a prime example of going through the whole scientific process and case studies, open clinical trials, all the way up to randomized controlled trials. Now, so we have a lot of data. And in fact, our most recent randomized controlled trial showed we had predicted that in advance, that people with co-morbid depression and PTSD would do better in VR because we could emotionally engage them in a way that regular talk therapy or imagination were very difficult. And we actually got that effect. So now that’s moving more towards precision medicine, where you look at the core components, not just the diagnosis, but what’s going on in the therapy process. And then you can start to see where VR hits a process that might not be available in a traditional therapy mode.
Will Stackable
I don’t want to get too far down the rabbit hole because I know this could be the whole episode. And I really want to get to some of the other interesting use cases in your work. Could you just talk a little bit about why is it important to get people to emotionally engage and what’s unique about VR that allows that in a way that isn’t possible with, I don’t know, let’s just say watching a movie or a flat screen.
Skip Rizzo
Well, I mean, that’s really the beauty of of VR, the ability to put people in simulations, remove the stimuli of the outside world. And the one thing we learned, even back in the ‘90s with very impoverished graphic content was that even if the world looked cartoonish, we could fool the brain. So phobic, walking across a plank bridge over a canyon would they know it’s not the real thing, but the limited the frontal lobes are saying it’s just a simulation, but the limbic system is reacting to the 3D that cues and everything as if it’s a real thing. And that’s what we’re in the business of, in therapy, we want to activate emotions so that now we have something to work with. If you don’t activate emotional responses in your patients, you’re going to be just talking in the abstract existential challenges. Activate those emotions, and then help patients recognize them, help them learn to cope with them more effectively and adapt. And that is what VR can do. It can activate those emotions. And it’s, when you interact, when you’re in a 3D space and you’re removed from your everyday setting, I think those are some of the key ingredients for that process.
Brad Scoggin
Yeah, absolutely. And, we talk a lot. There’s still a lot of people that exist in the world that haven’t put on headset. And I think until you do that, you can’t understand this. And I think everything you just talked about in a health care or clinical setting, it’s the exact same reason people learn faster and retain more information in VR.
Skip Rizzo
you look at the first time somebody tries a headset, what’s the natural response that you always see? mouth drops and you get that sense of awe.
Will Stackable
You look so goofy from the outside. And then you put the headset on, and it’s like a light bulb goes off. Oh, this is. Well.
Skip Rizzo
Mind VR – They’re doing great work for older adult populations. And part of that is emotional engagement, perhaps with, a reminiscence therapy context where it can bring back experiences that the person had in their youth and foster that reverie that is sought to be preservative against dementia later, demented symptoms, or at least helpful. I mean, we’re not going to where we’re at a point where we can say we can cure dementia by any means, but we can certainly maybe slow the progress of it. So one example, I put my mom in an application, she was 88 at the time of Rome. And what it was is, the penumbra world traveler application. And she hadn’t been to Rome in 44 years. But when she was in it, it just brought back a reverie, and she just couldn’t stop talking. Oh, I was there. Or there was a little bar over here Carl and I went to and on and on and on. And it was just a remarkable thing that we could engage people in these experiences from many years ago and bring them right up to the front, to the current time in a way that might be healing, helpful, boost emotional status, just giving somebody in a nursing home an experience they can’t get from there looking at, the four walls, you
know, and so I think Mind VR is doing great stuff. And they’re doing good work with veterans here and within the veterans home and hospital system, which is like, older adult care facilities for veterans. And, they’re having a lot of success with that.
Brad Scoggin
So I’ve got a question. Ask Chris this question – Chris Strickler from Mind Immersive. And a lot of these studies and a lot of the success Chris is having is based around, in my opinion, a little bit some of these soft data points, just like you said, there’s a self-reporting and, I think if you’re in the room, you see that there is something real here.
And maybe it’s it is hard to quantify. And so you have to just report on what the user is saying. And you do see Chris in Mind Immersive specifically, they’re growing rapidly and moving across the country. So some of the approvals they’re getting with Medicaid and other things are very impressive. But that’s always a question I have is how do we for [translate this for] somebody who’s more of a skeptic on VR or VR in therapy when a lot of the data is “well, I felt better or I preferred it or I was more engaged…” How do you like, translate that to maybe something that feels harder. Is that possible? Or how do you think about that?
Skip Rizzo
Yeah, it’s very challenging. Because what is the ultimate outcome that you’re trying to achieve where you’re trying to measure? With large numbers of people, if they do VR regularly, their rate of the mental symptoms is reduced or they die of something else before, you know that that kicks. And so you slowed the progress of that. but that’s extremely hard. And that would require, hundreds of thousands of data points. I think the best we can do is, aside from self-report is the physiological monitoring and maybe, behavioral ratings by staff members at a care facility as to, how many times in a month does a person get emotionally dysregulated or [what is] the actual use. Do users want to use it? I mean, that’s a that’s a good metric right there. Whether it’s hard science or it’s productization that’s successful, you build a product that somebody wants to use regularly. That’s somewhat of a measure of success. But there’s a lot of research that needs to be done. perhaps if MRI studies look at what’s happening in the brain even though you can’t move your head in, in a magnet. you have to project or wear magnet-friendly goggles. You’re not moving your head. So it’s not a VR experience, but you can do functional MRI with some of this type of content. And like Hunter Hoffman did with the pain management work, where he experimentally induced pain on a person’s foot while they’re in the magnet, they put these hot thermoses, and they found that when they were being distracted playing Snow World in the magnet on a projection but interactive – the five core areas of the brain that respond to pain were less active when doing the VR as opposed to trying, the control group.
Will Stackable
I remember reading that study and being so fascinated. And it made a lot of sense. my kids, when they’re focused on, I don’t know, watching Bluey, they could have their arm cut off, and I don’t know if they’d even, you know… and so the ability of your brain to focus or not focus on pain, we’ve all experienced when you’ve got a blister and you’re walking and how it is all consuming, it makes a lot of sense.
Skip Rizzo
Yep, yep. Well, we had done studies back in around 2003 at Children’s Hospital in LA on children that were really fearful of getting I.V. insertions or needles, and we found putting them in a VR headset and playing a game, as opposed to playing it on a flat screen or watching a cartoon, had much more of an anxiety reducing effect and self-reported decreases in pain, even though it was a quick one-and-done a thing. The anxiety and the pain all rolled together and we saw reductions in kids, and that was a big thing during Covid. I used to lend out an old Oculus headset that I had – forgetting the brand one that only had three degrees of freedom tracking – the Oculus Go, and I used to loan that out to families during Covid that had kids with special needs that were vulnerable and needed to get back. And, they reported that their kid was able to get through the needle stick. anecdotal feedback there, but nonetheless, science to document this as well, including our study from 2003.
Brad Scoggin
Well you talked about the power of focus to avoid pain. And you’ve done some work with words and using VR as a diagnostic tool for ADHD. Maybe tell us a little bit about that.
Skip Rizzo
Well, that was one of my first VR headset applications in 1998 where the equipment was very expensive and cumbersome and not that high fidelity, but we could create a virtual classroom that we could put a child in and test their cognitive performance, how well they perform on a task delivered on a blackboard up at the front of the classroom. But meanwhile, programing distractions that are common to a classroom like a school bus going by a window or kids fidgeting off to the side or somebody walking in or announcements on an intercom and we could measure how well they may maintain their attention on task versus how much time were they spending looking out the window or looking around. So we had the motor component captured as well in VR. So it was a perfect application for getting better assessment of real world performance of a child by predicting from the virtual world and quantifying performance. So that evolved over the years. It continues to this day. Now, in one of my first forays outside of academia, I partnered with a company that built out a more modern version of the system. And, now it’s a commercial product, a company called Cognitive Leap, that runs on a standalone headset. And, as opposed to the Silicon Graphics Onyx $200,000 engine that we had to run it on in 98. It’s running, and, and a flock of birds tracking system, magnetic tracking.
Skip Rizzo
But, now it runs on a quest, low cost, easy to use and delivers really high fidelity data to supplement, a clinician’s perspective or school systems perspective on a child’s capabilities and whether they’re in that domain of attention process impairments that might indicate they have ADHD or an anxiety disorder that impacts their performance in a real classroom and so on. That’s one I’m particularly proud of because I got to see it from, birth as an idea in 98 to now actually out there in the wild.
Will Stackable
Yeah. I want to talk about that a little bit more. You’re, maybe somewhat unique in that you were there at the beginning for some of the early research, just purely at the academic stage when, again, these headsets are massive and $25,000. And now we’re in a world where there’s accessible hardware you can buy at Best Buy, and you’ve sort of started to make the transition from the academic world to also working in industry. Share a little bit about, what that transition was like. And what you’ve been able to bring to industry from your 30 years of experience.
Skip Rizzo
Well, I actually feel like all my past academic work was like boot camp preparing me for working with companies that want a product out of these ideas and to build out things. I’m not such a great business guy. I tend to work from the heart a little bit more on the financial brain, but I do a little bit of that now. I’m growing that part. And so that’s a transition. Back in my academic days, you run a study, show efficacy under perfect conditions. and then, where does it go from there? Does it become shelved? where does it become something you can cite on your resumé as a study that you did or is it actually getting in the hands of users? And as I move through the through the years, that was something I always had a focus on direct application with patient populations. But then as the capabilities became feasible to deliver this in a cost-effective way, then I started to turn my attention at this point in my career to what I should be doing in “how do you get this thing out the door and in the hands of people that can benefit from it?”
Skip Rizzo
And you can’t do that in an academic environment. It’s not built for product design. It’s built for discovery in scientific understanding and building out the research, which you got to have that. I mean, you don’t want to put a product out there that doesn’t have any scientific support. But now, and outside of academia, I’m working with development teams in a number of companies that are well honed. They’ve been in place. They’re experts. We’re not relying on student programmers, which they can be very good to, but working in a way that makes it faster, better, cheaper. And I try to bring in the need for the science in my interactions with these companies. Before you can go for an FDA approval, you’re going to be able to, you got to back it up with something, and so that’s what I bring my old life into this new life, by weighing in on the science. But also, I still have a few ideas for products. Now I have opportunities to develop with these companies that I wouldn’t have. And, in my academic setting. So I’m 50/50 now. I’m half time USC enough to keep my benefits and my title and all that stuff. I’m still professor, which matters a little bit to be, and now I’ve got my foot in the other door and very happy.
Brad Scoggin
We didn’t mention at the beginning that we’re both University of Oklahoma grads. And so we have a little bit of – on the football side of things – riff with USC. So it just put salt in the wound.
Skip Rizzo
I understand. I won’t say fight on. That’s the Trojan call.
Will Stackable
You know one thing that has been interesting for us. Working with so many different companies. We have thousands of companies across a lot of different industries is we get to see these really interesting use cases that aren’t really public knowledge and are hidden gems. And when we were doing background research for this interview, we just kept seeing you have so many. So again, we could do another hour worth of just asking you about all these specifics, but one that I was interested in, partly because my mom had a traumatic brain injury, a TBI, a number of years ago, and the recovery process for her was really difficult and long. And part of what I think helped her fully recover was she decided to go back to teaching and being in a classroom setting with students – especially that those first two years – it was excruciating. But she, I think now, has fully regained all of her what she lost. And so I know one of the projects that you worked on was using VR for rehabilitation. I think both, physical rehab, but also for TBI. Could you just share a little bit about that?
Skip Rizzo
Yeah. I mean, that was what really got me into the field to begin with. My work as a clinician and brain injury rehab, where we found in the late 80s, early 90s, a lot of the content that we were using to facilitate that process was just so engaging. So you couldn’t get the users or the patients in this case to do sufficient trials in these kinds of cognitive stimulation or training activities. Or same goes for physical therapy following a stroke or TBI or orthopedic injury. Getting people to do physical therapy when you don’t have your therapists right there pushing you and being a cheerleader is very challenging. And we know that there’s a dose response level that you get people activated in a VR simulation that’s gamified, and you also measure their performance so you can give them feedback at any point, or you can measure change over time. But you’re inspiring activity. You’re engaging the person in these activities that they wouldn’t normally do. And so that’s where the real value in rehab is – it’s to build content that is not only measurable, but activating and engaging and inspiring. So people do more of the rehab. Now, your mom got lucky because she had a passion and she went into the school thing and she still had that core element that could help her to navigate. But it was probably painful as hell for. But she went and did something she loved, and that she had some capability and fought through it and recovered her skills. So whatever mechanism you use for helping a person to do that, not everybody that has a stroke had the opportunity that your mom has. So we try to do it in a VR context that invokes a similar process of engagement with the activities that they can benefit from.
Brad Scoggin
I know you’re working on some AI patient stuff. Maybe share with us about that.
Skip Rizzo
Yeah. Yeah. Well, this stuff that we’re working on, sort of around 2006, our center, the Institute for Creative Technology, has always had a research focus on building virtual humans that you could have credible interactions with. And I saw this negotiation training scenario that had been built for the Army to teach people – service members – how to negotiate with an Afghan warlord or a Doctors Without Borders doc in the war zone and all that. And when I saw that, I said, therapies in negotiation, why not build virtual patients? Novice clinicians to practice their interactions with to basically screw up with a virtual patient a bunch of times before they get their hands on a live one. So we started doing that with sexual trauma virtual patient we tested with medical students, psychiatry residents. And then it went on to suicide, interviews, with school social work here at USC. And it just continued to evolve. We ended up expanding on that virtual human model to health care support agents, things you might call a chat bot now on a mobile device, but much beyond a chat bot where the character could emote, the character could be more credible, interact. And now, with the gigantic advances in AI, all that work has just got an injection of power. Because now we’ve got real voice recognition and natural language processing fueled by AI generated databases that can be drawn upon for fostering incredible interactions depending on the use case. So we’re doing things with burnt out doctors where they can interact with the character online and do a self-assessment as to if they have secondary PTSD or compassion fatigue or burnout. And interact and find out resources. These are kinds of things that folks don’t often get. Doctors are going to go to another doctor and say, “I think I’m losing it,” but they will talk to a virtual agent about these issues and self-disclose more and we’re doing that with a mobile device for the VA, called Battle Buddy, which is basically a veteran health and wellness bot that also has a suicide safety planning component built into it. So, you’ve got a buddy that you can talk to any time and that can give you information about your status. Tracked your Apple Watch or Fitbit, your information about that. And that now has evolved into a whole spectrum of applications, both at USC and also working with the company Sidekick that’s very interested in this with Amir Rubin and his team. And this is this is all doable now in a way we couldn’t do a couple of years ago. So now I just worked up a white paper on taking Battle Buddy and creating Birthing Buddy, which is an app that’s similar for women. While they’re going through the pregnancy, they can get information from particularly women, low socioeconomic status or rural locations, or where they don’t have access to great health care. They can engage in dialog with this character and get information and track their temperature and their heart rate and all that during that time. It’s building a model of that user. So then after the person gives birth, then if they start to run into trouble with a highly stigmatized condition or postpartum depression, or a lot of times these folks won’t even tell their husband the difficult feelings are going through. They can talk to this character and they can get access to resources, it’s not a replacement for real people, because if problems are severe enough, you want to have that persuasive message in the interaction that guides and toward actually seeking help with a real person that can really attend to their needs in a way only a human can. Although AI is gobbling up some of that, I think it’s freeing clinicians to go back to the old school of developing a relationship with a patient, having the time, to understand what they’re going through in ways to have a shared human experience. So, it’s dynamic tension between what are the productivity tools of a safe and professionally delivered AI tool versus actual interaction with or with a real health care provider? And how do you maximize the value of both of those, so that we can get health care out to the masses that don’t have access? World Health Organization estimates about a billion people on the planet right now have a mental health condition of which two thirds will never see the inside of a therapy office. So maybe we can reach those folks and make their lives better, either through the interaction with the AI content or application, all the features it affords or by guiding them towards getting over the stigma or the aversion to actually talking to a real healthcare professional about their problems. So I’m excited. That’s got me really excited. Now things have changed in the last couple of years, dramatically so.
Brad Scoggin
it’s just so powerful. And I think it’s so interesting for people to realize and understand. I mean, even for us, we’ve been in VR for eight years, which feels like a long time. But the reality is so much of the fruit that we’re seeing today in VR was started 20 or 30 years ago, and the technology is finally ripe to be able to pick the fruit. You talk about access, and we think about VR as this tool that gives us our time back. You learn faster, you retain more information. But what even for me personally, just recently thinking about the access component, which might be the most powerful piece because as you mentioned. Just in that specific example – a billion people without access or maybe a third of those who don’t have access… And that’s just one specific use case. So just powerful.
As we actually move to a close, w’ere with the OG here. So we’ve got to say or ask you this. So what do you think surprises us in the next 10 to 20 years? So you started 20, 30 years ago. What’s the next 20 or 30 years look like? What surprises us with VR?
Skip Rizzo
Well, we already talked about the AI component, and that’s going to that’s going to filter across everything, whether it’s somebody doing physical therapy in the system, constantly monitoring their progress and systematically updating the challenges for the patient so that they stay in that flow channel, like in gaming where it’s not too hard, you get frustrated, not too easy, that you get bored and you keep people engaged. And also reading the patient from their bio signals, trying to understand consistent patterns that their body may reflect. So going back to the question about how do we measure benefits in older people, families, reminiscence experiences, big data analytics for bodily response and interactivity and tracking people in their everyday life, how much activity, how much sleep, all these things. So combination of AI, wearables and, quite honestly, I would have to say that that is the big thing. I mean, building out VR environments – we know how to do that. We know how to build context. We’ll be able to talk to an AI engine and say, I want a Ukrainian battlefield with artillery in World War One, like trenches and being I’ve got a VR environment built in five minutes that creates, so the content creation part, the sensing of the user’s state to feed into a real time process and to be able to do good science, because now everything is being measured. Now, the downside of it is, are there going to be bad AI applications? Certainly. I mean, you see the misuse of technology and we can’t let that distract from taking advantage of the benefits. So I see in the next ten years, a further integration of AI, VR, AR, whatever mixed reality into reality and sensing of users facial expressions, activity levels, wearables, all that, bio sensors. My wife has a glucose sensor that she wears. That’s incredible feedback for her to maintain her blood sugar and look at what foods mess her up or whatever. Well, you add all that into this mix, and now you’ve got a complete revolution in how health care will be delivered in the next ten years if we can address the ethical and professional challenges, which I believe we will. So I’m excited. There’s not one day I get up and I’m bored thinking, well, I hit a wall here. I don’t think I have any more ideas. So, it’s like I wake up and it’s like, okay, let’s go. We’re all very lucky in this field of VR. I think that’s a universal across people that work in VR – that we’re very passionate. We’re very excited. It has meaning and we’re doing something functionally relevant for the world. So it’s happy place to be.
Brad Scoggin
I totally agree. We talked actually talked about that, Will, in our talk about this week just how much we love our job. I mean, the amount of effort and time we’ve all put into this for so long. Yeah, it’s so fun every day. This has been great. Thank you so much for your time. where can people find you online?
Skip Rizzo
Well, I’m an old school email guy, but I also have a YouTube channel that I put new stuff up pretty regular. It’s “Albert Skip Rizzo”, my full name. It’ll turn up, and it’s about 180 videos up there. New stories, demo videos, interviews. I have my own podcast, Immersive Tech Talk that I do once a month and have leaders in the field of clinical VR, really weigh in. And my website at USC. I’m on X, but I don’t ever use the damn thing. I hate it.
Brad Scoggin
Well, we will put links to that in the show notes. And we appreciate it. Just look forward to connecting again soon.
Skip Rizzo
Yeah. This has been great. I enjoyed talking to you guys, and hopefully we’ll be able to get together and have a beer sometime.
Brad Scoggin
That’ll be great.
Will Stackable
Let’s do it. Thanks Skip.
Brad Scoggin
Man. we have such a privileged seat that we get to hear about real world applications and use cases almost on a daily basis. It was very refreshing and a bit grounding, maybe even to hear and be reminded of the real hard research that’s gone into this over the years and really laid the foundation for the real cool stories that we get to hear and share.
Will Stackable
It’s true. I was struck at some point when he was talking about just how long things take to develop, and, I think to myself, I need to be more patient. Skip has been doing this for 30 years. There’s research he did back in the 90s and early 2000 that is just now coming to fruit and being developed into commercial applications. Here we are. It’s been eight years, but this technology is accelerating. The use cases are growing. The adoption rate is growing. There’s still obviously millions of millions of people who have never put on a headset. And that’s fine. It’s going to take a lot longer for that to happen. But it was just maybe a good encouragement for all of us to just to be patient, to realize that, these things take time and, and even I know we often talk to practitioners within companies that feel frustrated at how long it can take to go from pilot stage to any scale, even when you have really tangible, incredible ROI results at the at the pilot stage. And I think maybe that is just the nature of new technology. And we’re younger. And so we haven’t been through a few technology adoption cycles, but I’m sure people who saw the potential in the internet and felt like this is going to be here tomorrow, and, well, it took decades to really become pervasive. So hang tight. We’re it’s happening. We just have to continue riding the wave.
Brad Scoggin
Yep. Yep. Yep. So true. Well, as always, thank you so much for spending a little bit of your day with us. And make sure you check us out wherever you listen to podcasts, and we will catch you next time.
