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b'Game engines\\nlike the versatile Unity have long been the go-to for AR development,\\nand for good reason. But its reputation as a video game engine can\\nalso be intimidating \\u2014 especially to those who want to create AR\\nsoftware for enterprise. That\\u2019s why Paul Reynolds lit his TORCH; an\\napp he co-founded that lets you design your own AR platform, right in\\nthe palm of your hand. He chats with Alan about his claim to flame.\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: Hey, everyone, my name\\u2019s\\nAlan Smithson, the host of the XR for Business Podcast. Today\\u2019s guest\\nis Paul Reynolds, the CEO of Torch, a really exciting augmented\\nreality platform. It\\u2019s a mobile augmented reality development and\\ndeployment platform for enterprise. Paul has been a software\\ndeveloper and technology consultant since 1997 \\u2013 since before the\\ninterwebs! In 2013, after 10 years of creating video games, he joined\\nMagic Leap where he was promoted to senior director, overseeing\\ncontent and SDK teams. At Magic Leap, Paul recognized the lack of\\naccessible tools for non-game developers that was hindering\\nwidespread adoption of immersive and spatial computing technologies.\\nIn 2016, Paul moved to Portland, Oregon, where he founded Torch to\\naddress this very problem. To learn more about Torch, you can visit\\ntorch.app. Paul, welcome to the show.\\n\\n\\n\\nPaul: Thanks for having me.\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: It\\u2019s such a pleasure. I\\u2019ve\\nbeen looking forward to this episode. Torch is such a cool platform\\nand I keep seeing your posts on LinkedIn of putting stuff around your\\noffice and stuff. So tell us, what is Torch, and how did you come up\\nwith this crazy idea?\\n\\n\\n\\nPaul: The easiest way to think\\nabout it is, it\\u2019s a mobile application \\u2014 currently for iOS \\u2014 that\\nlets anyone build interactive spatial scenes. So, you create a\\nproject and you\\u2019re building it in the camera of your device, which\\nmeans you\\u2019re also walking around the space, or moving around the\\nspace and you\\u2019re building up interactive experiences visually,\\nwithout writing any code. We call that the design environment, and\\nthat\\u2019s the freely available [option] \\u2014 anyone can jump into it and\\njust start building. What makes it a platform is the capability of\\ntaking what you\\u2019ve created in Torch, and exporting it and publishing\\nit and integrating it into your existing app, or pushing it out to\\nanother platform or tool. What we really wanted to focus on was\\nallowing people to iterate in augmented reality \\u2014 directly within\\naugmented reality \\u2014 as opposed to sitting on a desktop computer and\\ntrying to figure out how to work a game editor, and get more people\\nable to work productively in 3D. That\\u2019s really the heart of it.\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: That\\u2019s so cool, because if\\nyou\\u2019re sitting at your office, you\\u2019re like, \\u201cwow, this AR stuff\\nis hot. It\\u2019s amazing.\\u201d You know what, go learn Unity and coding\\nand figure out how to actually make it. Six months later, you\\u2019re\\nlike, \\u201coh, look, I made a portal.\\u201d\\n\\n\\n\\nPaul: [laughs] Right.\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: What you guys have built\\nis a simple way to just do it visually.\\n\\n\\n\\nPaul: Yeah. So, my background\\nwas in video games, back in the day where everyone was building their\\nown engine. You really didn\\u2019t even have time to build a really nice\\neditor on top of that. So when Unity came out \\u2014 we\\u2019ll pick on Unity\\nin particular, because it\\u2019s just such a well-known product \\u2014 when it\\ncame out, it was the game engine that most of these game studios I\\u2019ve\\nworked for wanted to build. And that was really unique; they had\\nbasically taken what would normally mean millions and millions of\\ninternal R&D dollars, and turned it into this tool that pretty\\nmuch anyone can download for free. B'