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How will the convergence of 5G and AR and artificial intelligence lead to the creation of experiences that no one\u2019s ever imagined? Join Forbes columnist and author Charlie Fink to find out!\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlan: Hello everybody. Today\u2019s guest is one of my good friends and someone I consider a mentor. XR consultant, columnist, speaker, and author, Mr. Charlie Fink. Charlie Fink is a Forbes columnist and an author of two AR-enabled books \u2013 Charlie Fink\u2019s Metaverse: A Guide to VR and AR, and Convergence: How the World Will Be Painted with Data. Charlie is a former Disney, AOL, and AG Interactive executive, famous for coming up with the idea that turned into The Lion King. Charlie was EVP and COO of VR Pioneer Virtual World Entertainment. He was an SVP of AOL Studios and president of the American Greetings Interactive. Charlie founded and exited to venture-backed startups and has produced over 30 award-winning Broadway musicals. Charlie is leading the way in XR for business by covering and reporting on everything XR-related. With that, let\u2019s welcome Charlie Fink.\n\n\n\nCharlie:\n Wow, I don\u2019t know if I can live up to an introduction like that.\nThank you Alan.\n\n\n\nAlan:\n Oh you\u2019re amazing. You\u2019re amazing and thank you so much for being on\nthe show. First of all I want to congratulate you on the launch of your new\nbook Convergence, an AR-enabled book about AR. Maybe you can tell us a little\nbit about the book, and why it came to be.\n\n\n\nCharlie:\n Well, we were looking at doing a second edition of the first book\nwhich sold very well, but it soon became apparent that the AR topic in\nparticular had been sort of glossed over in the first book, which was largely\nabout VR. So, I started to think about the idea of doing a new book, and I got\na lot of support for it in the community. In fact, it is a sponsored book,\nmeaning I got enough donations that I could afford to write the book and get it\nprinted. It\u2019s printed on premium paper and it\u2019s priced high like a textbook at\nfifty dollars \u2013 of course it\u2019s filled with an hour of animation \u2013 so it\u2019s not a\nnormal book and it doesn\u2019t adhere to book economics. So to make it work I\nreally needed to build a community of about 100 people around the book, many\nproviding augmented scenes and many actually contributing thought leadership\nand reporting. The topic of the book kind of evolved because I, you know,\noriginally I was thinking the title would be something like \u2018the many modes of\nAR,\u2019 or \u2018how the world will be painted with data,\u2019 which is a phrase I coined,\nwhich suggests a fully-scaleable AR cloud. Which would make the devices we\nuse a whole lot more useful and interesting than they are today, where we use\nsomething called marker-based AR. \n\n\n\nAnd as I got into the book and editing the\nwork of my collaborators, it was clear everyone was talking about the same\nthing, which is this world of ubiquitous, wearable computing. What the final\nform factor will be we can debate, but this idea of a magic-verse based on a\nmirror world became the theme of the book, which is essentially the convergence\nof 5G and AR and artificial intelligence that would manage all of this data for\nyou so that it is wanted and contextual. Otherwise, if it\u2019s interrupting you, I\ndon\u2019t see how that\u2019s possibly a welcome augmentation, right? It can\u2019t be showing\nyou advertising; it has to show you what you want when you want it or where you\nneed it. You don\u2019t need to see the weather in front of your eyes spatially,\nalthough it would be fun from time to time. But the truth is you know what the\nweather is. \n\n\n\nSo that became the title of the book,\nConvergence. And if you look at history you know there have been a number of\nmoments of sort of platform innovation that launched heretofore uncon