Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ygEJm5XuRA

Full transcript:

Boost Numbers Podcast: Jason Marsh, Founder of Flow Immersive

Introduction

In this installment of the Boost Numbers podcast, we talk with Jason Marsh, founder of Flow Immersive, a company specializing in augmented reality (AR) for data visualization. As technology evolves, adoption is a key element for success, and AR technology is no different. Here, Jason discusses human learning, brain science, and what "cool" means in technology. Enjoy the episode.

Bill: Welcome to another installment of the Boost Numbers podcast. Today we have Jason Marsh, founder of Flow Immersive. I'm incredibly excited because it's an area that I have some personal interest in, and it's very technical and very visual. So we'll probably do something a little different than the other podcasts so far and get to see what Jason is working on. It's in the data visualization space using augmented reality glasses, which we all know are coming quickly. That's about all I'll say because I would love to hear your description, Jason, on what it does. But first, welcome to the podcast. I'm super excited to have you here.

Jason: Thanks, Bill. Really great to be here, and it'll be fun to walk through and talk a little bit about what we're doing and what it all means.

The Inevitability of AR Adoption

Bill: Awesome, I appreciate it. So I think about augmented reality, and it's one of those things—just being in the technical world—I view it as something folks will use. You can picture these devices, personal devices. People are wearing them more and more. They're becoming more ubiquitous. I had an Apple Watch a million years ago. Didn't catch on for me, but now I kind of want another one because they're so much better.

I think about being in a corporate building, an office, and somebody walking in now with their new Meta Glasses, and they're recording the meeting, and it's transcribing it, and you might not even know what they're doing. These technology advocates, early adopters, are really going to figure all this stuff out and help pave the way for what you're doing because you're using a similar platform for data visualization. To me, I view it as something that's just coming. Is that something that you think, in terms of the physical adoption of glasses and what you'll show us here later—what it actually does—but I'm curious on the hardware side, what your thoughts are?

Jason: Yeah, I think there's an inevitability at this point, which feels different than certainly the virtual reality space. Because the world's largest corporations are spending billions to make this happen, and they're showing prototypes and they're delivering product. So we know that the evolution is coming and that the product will be out there. We're already using it in ways that are really pretty meaningful to customers. So it's real.

Bill: Yeah, I can see that. Having a little bit of a manufacturing background and knowing some folks, that was always one—you imagine you're putting something together or you forgot some instructions. You might be a mechanic or you're fixing something. Just putting that right in your hands is one reality. It's not exactly what you guys are doing, but again, just more and more use cases. As these devices become available, I could see them being used.

You've shared a little bit on your website at flowimmersive.com and on your LinkedIn profile some videos, and I get an idea of how this works. But I'd love for you to walk us through it if you could. If they were VR glasses, we couldn't do this—we would just be sitting here with goggles on and it'd be pretty boring. But this week you'll be able to show, which I'm excited about. So I'd love for you to walk us through what it does and how folks are using it.

Demonstrating Flow Immersive

Jason: Sure. And yeah, I'll just say who I am and what this is about and show it at the same time. So if you're listening, I'll describe somewhat what you're seeing.

The first shot is a pair of XReal glasses on a table, and I'm just going to pick them up and put them on my head. And voila—now you're seeing rows of stock portfolio data floating in front of me in my office. There's also an avatar pointing out certain things about that, which is really nice to realize that this future requires a multi-user environment. Everybody needs to be sitting and looking at your data floating above the table.

What I'm showing right now is actually the AI portion of our product, where you can ask the AI to generate a moving average of the data or filter to certain time ranges—essentially anything you can think of. One of the fun ones is actually to say, "Show me the changes since the presidential inauguration." When you do something like that, it's going to write the Python code to process the data. But you actually can't do that today when you're looking at your typical portfolio.

The Brain Science Behind 3D Visualization

When you see data visualization floating in front of you and you can lean in and walk around it and do real-time filtering, it gives you this sense of mastery and control that feels very different than looking at a flat screen presentation.

It's designed to be absolutely multi-user. There should be no passive observers in your meeting. Everyone should be able to click and interact. You can see what they're pointing at with their virtual laser pointer, and you're all in it together. The whole time it's touching your brain in a very different way than looking at a flat screen.

The way our hippocampus—a little organ in our brain—organizes our spatial information, it activates a large portion of your visual cortex in a way that never happens when you're looking at a flat screen. Your spatial awareness actually sticks, so you get long-term memory of what you're seeing. I've proven this over and over again. I'll go up to someone a year later after a demo and say, "Tell me what you saw," and they can describe it to me in quite a bit of detail. Try to do that with a PowerPoint deck—no one's going to remember that PowerPoint deck five minutes after you finish, basically.

The last point why this really makes sense is you can see so much more detail in 3D. With stereo vision, you can see the layers. This is really important. It's a fundamental flaw with PowerPoint and why we get bored and tired with PowerPoint decks: every time a PowerPoint slide goes away to go to the next one, it's flushing it from your visual cortex. Your visual cortex now has to reset itself and go, "Okay, what is this slide? Does it have any relationship to the prior slide?"

You as the PowerPoint creator know how all these slides go together. You've rearranged them, you've thought about them, but your audience doesn't know, and they have a much harder time seeing the relationships from slide A to B to C. Here we collapse maybe 10 of those slides into a single view. The relationships are just so obvious. The outliers are so obvious. You're taking advantage of the way the brain sees patterns and finds patterns, and the way the brain organizes information, which is 3D.

We've forgotten that. We've been looking at screens and books and papyrus and cave walls for so long that we've forgotten that the way we actually build mental models is 3D. When you actually put a 3D model in front of someone, especially symbolic information like we're doing with data visualization, it's more understandable. It's deeper. It sticks in a different way. And it just has this feel of mastery and control that feels good as humans.

Learning and Retention Benefits

Bill: That's fascinating. I hadn't really even thought about the potential to retain and learn. I'm still personally a person that jots down notes on paper. I use all the tools, transcription tools and everything that's available, but in the end, how do I force a little bit more memorization or better recall of that information? I'll take a note, and that's been shown to help.

I hadn't really thought about the visualization and having been personally in how many meetings looking at endless PowerPoint slides or Excel graphs, and having created tons of those—whether it was my days as a Six Sigma person doing statistics or in sales showing trends—so many times you show that 2D, like you said, it's like a cave painting or papyrus version. The next question from the crowd is going to be drilling into that: "Well, okay, that's great, but what about the data behind it?"

Thinking about folks that know how to use the Flow Immersive tool and just build the visualization completely differently to actually tell that story all at once is an aha for me. I'm sitting here going, I didn't really think of it in those terms—just to see it all at once and then collaborate. And of course, my other thought was with the AI just making it much easier to use, taking away that "I need to be a statistician to be able to build the graph" concept. I'm going to get some help there.

That's fascinating. I have a gazillion questions and of course want to ask how you even got into this to begin with at Flow Immersive. But while we're on the topic, after having seen how cool that is, where do you see—who uses it today or who do you think will use it? I know you're developing and it's a very new product getting out in the market. Are there particular industries or particular types, or is it "hey, we don't know, it may just be endless folks"? I'm just curious your thoughts on where this lands in the near term for users.

Nine Years of Innovation

Jason: Sure. Well, just to correct you, we have been working on this for nine years. We've been in business for over nine years now. And also to be clear, the VR headsets, even with pass-through, didn't really fit the bill for our audience. If you've got a VR training use case or something, you tell the trainee to put it on, they put it on, you're done. But if you're in a corporate boardroom, especially if you're talking to executives and you're going to ask them to put this thing in front of their face—even though you tell them they're going to be able to see through it—the human factors are just severe. They didn't work for our use case. We struggled. We built great product, but in order to try to scale in those environments has not succeeded, I would say.

But the glasses change that so much. The glasses are a form factor that we are so comfortable using. In fact, when I say glasses, they really are glasses. [Shows glasses] Glasses are a hard technology that we wear within an inch of our eyes and we're absolutely comfortable with. So it's a very human, humane technology. AI is also very humane, and the combination together—you're no longer tying up your hands, you're no longer blocking your view or looking away from the people you're talking to. The net result of what we've built is much more human.

Target Markets and Applications

So where does that fit? If you've got a very human product, easy to use, the AI walks you through, the AI can answer—not quite your wildest dreams, but at least know how to deal with this data in very meaningful ways—the applications are broad.

Our key toeholds so far have been in consulting, financial services, and public policy. We were part of the UN General Assembly for two years, and the World Bank has been a customer. I've done a lot of data visualization around climate change personally, just a personal interest of mine. Consultancies have used it for supply chain analysis, for risk analysis, for energy, gas, oil topics. In financial services, one of the most obvious use cases is wealth portfolio management—looking at your portfolio, understanding your stocks and equities and relationships between those.

Now, as we bring the glasses to this set of customers—the glasses we've only had this whole environment for about three months now, since this summer—as we bring it to this set of customers, it just feels really different. I think that the success curve and scalability curve will be on a very different scale than what we've had before.

Bill: That's great. And I couldn't agree more on the form factor. For anyone who might be on the younger side viewing this—there comes a day when you will wear glasses. That comes from your ophthalmologist, your optometrist. They're like, "Look, you hit a certain point. Everyone needs glasses just to get through the day." Let alone we put sunglasses on all day long.

So it really probably is just—I didn't realize it was that recent. That might have been why I was thinking of a newer product. It's just that platform. But to your point, weight and size—there are things that have to be worked out, but in the end, it's a pair of glasses that everyone has put on in some form or another, which is, I would imagine, going to help adoption tremendously as these things get out there versus a big, heavy VR headset that weighs a couple three pounds and is awkward and all that good stuff. So that's really cool and exciting.

Like I said, I think everyone will just use these eventually. I've been thinking about trying a set of these glasses just to see—is that where we're going to land with these tools? So it's very interesting.

Looking into your background, you mentioned nine years. Any particular thing that just brought you into this? Do you like to just tinker with new technology? Did you just see the need? I'm curious—it's a very specific and very innovative and cutting-edge technology in many ways. Is that where you like to just spend your time and learn, or is there anything that brought you into this space?

Background and Motivation

Jason: I've been—well, I started my career at Apple Computer in 1991 working on speech recognition. So I've been around a little while, and I've always been at the user interface layer and cutting-edge tools—how we interact with information and human interface design.

So when VR started to be a thing about 10 years ago—at least this generation of VR, I should say—I just discovered it and found that if I could come up with a way for people to understand, to communicate the information—the core information that we use to run our organizations—that would be exciting, valuable, fun, engaging. I thought at first it was going to be more like a PowerPoint-to-VR kind of product, but turns out that data visualization is what resonated the most. But both of those are still fundamentally symbolic information, which is different than most other use cases. Training use cases, even games or fantasy environments mostly.

To figure out a way that we can see the relationships with ideas and get this mental model—3D mental model—in our heads into someone else's heads, that was really the motivation. We've just been building and iterating from that core idea.

I also mentioned that the company's name is Flow. Flow is actually a pretty deep psychological concept which describes not just relaxing and being chill. It's accomplishing a difficult task and having all the tools you need in order to do that. That feeling of mastery—you've heard me say it before—that feeling of mastery and real-time manipulation and communication skills and whatever. I just felt that really captured the essence of what we're trying to do: to help people find that flow in the work they're doing every day with their colleagues.

Future Vision

Bill: Got it. Happy you're out there doing it, as a lot of people will be. Spending a lot of time in the past I had in healthcare and software, and I can just picture the big annual conference—pick any of them—and there's of course a lot of data in that space. But there's more than people might know on just analyzing populations of patients or operating a hospital system and all the data that needs to be reported and monitored and all that stuff.

I can just see at the trade show, everyone that's making some type of software solution has some of these glasses and says, "Hey, come check out our analysis part of what our tool does. It may be managing patients, it might be managing staff, maybe clinical in nature." That's just one vertical because I'm familiar with it, but I can see it. And having been a salesperson, I could see myself: "Hey, come put these glasses on, check out how you can see the data that we're collecting." It's just really cool.

So being a techie kind of guy, I love the fact that you're just jumping out there and advancing the state-of-the-art to where it's eventually going to wind up. Is there any novelty to it? Is it something that's going to stick?

Defining "Cool"

Jason: Yeah, let's define the word "cool" for a moment. So don't think about my product. Just give me some adjectives or some one-word definitions of the word cool.

Bill: Cool. Well, cool could be fun. Kind of slick, sleek comes to mind. Something—one word—desirable. Some people see something cool, they might want that. I don't know. Am I close? Am I getting there?

Jason: Oh, well, it's an interesting word. I've actually asked a lot of people this question, and it's a huge variety. A lot of people do say new, a sense of novelty. There's a lot of ways to think about a slang term like this, but we all kind of know what it means as a concept.

I was talking once to a skateboarder who had just seen what I'd done, and he helped me realize that cool really is not tied to technology. So a cool skateboard trick isn't a technological wonder. Even like the BMW driving experience—there's something about the way it feels that is cool. And it's not really high-tech. It's a sense of mastery and control. If the skateboarder has this control over that board and over gravity, and you just go, "Oh, that's sweet." Our brains love that sense of control.

The core inspiration for the company was maybe Iron Man, the first Iron Man, where Tony Stark is essentially in augmented reality. He's basically flicking bits, flicking atoms to create a new element, and then Jarvis is there working with him. So you've got the AI component. You just think, "Oh, that's so fun" when he throws his arms open and sees the whole thing around him and he's like, "Ah!"

So that feeling of coolness we've encoded into the app to give you that through mastery and control. If you can see exactly what you want to see when you want to see it, you can manipulate it the way you want to see it, you can share it the way you want to share it, you have all of that plus a sense of aesthetic beauty—well, that's cool. But we're not trying to be novelty.

As part of my sales technique, even when a potential customer says, "Oh, this is cool. I'll go show my manager," I say, "Let me tell you a different way of describing it than the word 'cool' because I don't want to be cool. I don't want to be some future tech that you're going to do someday."

Flow is something you can do today with these glasses. We've built the implementation. It's our full app. It all works beautifully with AI. It's something you can do tomorrow or today, not something to do next year. And it's not something that's just cool and future tech. It's practical mastery and control today.

Bill: I appreciate that. To be able to do those things you described would be very cool, using the term as you're describing it. So I love that clarification. As you know with your background and certainly here with this company, "cool" doesn't go too far in the business world. It's "Okay, what does it do for me? I'm going to invest in this thing. Am I going to get some kind of return?" So it's an important distinction. It's a practical tool. It looks cool, but it's very functional and productive. So I love that. I love that definition. That's very cool.

Jason: If it tickles your brain in some way, then that's the goal. I'll just say there's about a dozen different ways we've encoded the best brain science that we can understand into this app. I was talking about PowerPoint violating the way the brain wants to view information by making things disappear. Our organizational systems don't like disappearing stuff. So now we have a series of steps and we animate from step to step so that you maintain that mental coherence as you're walking through the data story.

Bill: Yeah, and the collaboration—I'm thinking through all those meetings sitting back in the day in the office and swiping through slides. It wasn't that I didn't have enough coffee—my brain was battling. So that's good to know. That's really interesting.

Closing Thoughts

Well, thank you, Jason, for bringing us through all this today. It's an absolutely amazing topic. Again, I'll just restate: I love innovation that's taken us to a new place that's very tactile, very visual, and is going to be the norm at some point in terms of usage. And it's a little peek for folks—go out to flowimmersive.com, check your product out on LinkedIn. There are great videos to know more about it because, as you said, it's here, it's real, people are using it. Technology changes a bit with the glasses, but that's a good thing—it's better for everyone. So I encourage anyone to go take a look and learn more about it.

Anything on your mind? Any last words before we wrap up this installment? It's been really educational for me for sure, and I'm sure for listeners and viewers. Any final thoughts for the podcast?

Jason: No, the cool is really part of the why, and it's really good to start with the why and end with the why when discussing technology. So I think you really brought that into the conversation in a nice way.

Bill: Well, thanks again, Jason, for joining the Boost Numbers podcast. Really great, and hopefully we'll catch up somewhere down the road again when the whole six billion people are wearing these things every day in a productive manner. So thanks again for joining.