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Upskilling things like floor management or assembly time, that\u2019s easy in XR. But soft skills, like understanding and empathy? A bit more challenging \u2014 but importantly, not impossible. Cortney Harding talks with Alan about how emerging tech, like VR and 360 video, can help us all be a little kinder to one another.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlan: Hey, everyone, Alan Smithson here. Today, we\u2019re speaking with Cortney Harding, founder and CEO of Friends with Holograms, about their full service VR and AR agency, that focuses on soft skills training and best practices for creating powerful content that delivers results. All that and more on the XR for Business Podcast.Welcome to the show, Cortney.\n\n\n\nCortney: Oh, thanks for having\nme.\n\n\n\nAlan: It\u2019s my absolute pleasure.\nI\u2019m so excited to have you on the show. You guys have done some\nincredible things and you\u2019ve been a pioneer in this industry for\nquite some time. But I\u2019ll let you talk to everybody about how you got\ninto this and where you are now and where you\u2019re going.\n\n\n\nCortney: Yeah, great. So I got\ninto VR about almost five years ago now, which is crazy to think\nabout. I have a background in the music business and specifically I\nwas a journalist.I wrote for Billboard. I was an editor there for\nquite a while. I then went into the music tech space right around the\ntime Spotify launched in the US. It was a great music and tech\necosystem.\n\n\n\nAlan: You and I have a very\nsimilar background.\n\n\n\nCortney: Oh, funny.\n\n\n\nAlan: I was a DJ for 20 years\nand then created the Emulator, the DJ touchscreen.\n\n\n\nCortney: Oh, cool.\n\n\n\nAlan: Yeah. And then I got into\nVR. I was like, \u201cWhat?\u201d Go on. I didn\u2019t mean to cut you\noff. I was like, \u201cWow, this is great.\u201d\n\n\n\nCortney: No, it\u2019s great. Yeah.\nSo anyway, so I did music tech stuff for several years. I was\u2013 I\nlead business development, and strategy, and partnerships for a\ncouple different startups. And then I saw this VR piece at an art\nmuseum about five years ago, and it really broke something open for\nme. And I was fascinated by it. So I spent about a year \u2014 I was\nstill on contract with a music tech company \u2014 and I was still\nwriting at the time. So I wrote about VR, I learned about VR, I met a\nlot of people. And in 2016, at South by Southwest, I did a panel on\nmusic and virtual reality. And one of my other panelists was this\nguy, Kevin Cornish, who\u2019s starting a VR production company, he\u2019s a VR\ndirector. And he and I had a really nice conversation, we hit it off.\nAnd I joined his VR production company, leading business development\nstrategy. I worked there for about a year and a half. I learned a\ntremendous amount. It was a very, very intense experience and a very\ngratifying one.And then I split off to do my own thing. And so\nFriends With Holograms has been around for about two years now, sort\nof in its current incarnation. And in those couple of years, we\u2019ve\ndone a lot of different projects, which I\u2019m really proud of. \n\n\n\n\nSort of our our best known project is\nthe Accenture Avenues Project. So we worked on that with Accenture.\nAnd the backstory behind that is pretty fascinating. So Accenture\ncame to us, I believe, right about two years ago now, right when\nwe\u2019re first starting and said \u201cWe have this idea, we want to do\nthis really amazing social work training project. And would you like\nto bid for it?\u201d And we, of course, said yes. So we bid for it\nand we were awarded it in the spring of last year. And then\neverything kind of went quiet for a while. And we were working on\nsome other projects. And I just kind of in the back