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One of Alan\u2019s favourite XR\nexperiences was running into a room at the Royal York Hotel, filled\nwith 200 people, all deathly silent and hooked into VR headsets. It\nmay sound like a Matrix prequel, but it was actually a demo of PwC\u2019s\nVR platform. Jeremy Dalton \u2014 the author of this anecdote \u2014 stops by\nto talk about mass VR technology.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlan: Welcome to the XR for\nBusiness Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today\u2019s guest is\nJeremy Dalton. Jeremy leads PwC\u2019s Virtual and Augmented Reality Team,\nhelping clients across all sectors understand, quantify and implement\nthe benefits of virtual and augmented reality technology. As part of\nhis mission to educate, connect, and inspire, he\u2019s also a member of\nthe World Economic Forum, Virtual and Augmented Reality Global Future\nCouncil, and sits on the Advisory Board of Immerse UK, a cross-sector\nnetwork for businesses, research and educational organisations in the\nimmersive technology industry. Jeremy is also an advisor for the\nVR/AR Association, and he\u2019s also a mentor for our XR Ignite program.\nTo learn more about PwC\u2019s VR and AR endeavors, you can visit\nPwC.co.uk/vr. \n\n\n\n\nWelcome to the show, Jeremy.\n\n\n\nJeremy: Hi, Alan. It\u2019s a\npleasure to be here.\n\n\n\nAlan: It\u2019s such an honor and a\npleasure to have you on the show. We\u2019ve been communicating for many\nyears now and we even have a kind of a joint research folder that\nwe\u2019ve been adding to over the years. So it\u2019s really great to have you\non the show.\n\n\n\nJeremy: Definitely, I\u2019m looking\nforward to getting stuck in.\n\n\n\nAlan: [laughs] Yeah, it\u2019s\namazing. So I just want to tell a quick story. About two months ago,\nyou came to Toronto with your PwC team and ran a partners conference,\nand you had an enormous number of simultaneous virtual reality\nexperiences. So you wanna maybe just explain what that was and how\nthat came to be?\n\n\n\nJeremy: Yeah, sure. So this was\na particularly exciting project for us where \u2014 very, very quickly,\nin summary \u2014 we put 200 people into virtual reality at the same time\nand they all had this simultaneous experience in the same room. And I\nwas able to collect that data in real time and understand exactly\nwhere in that experience they were and what decisions they were\nmaking in that world. So it was fantastic. It went off without a\nhitch, thankfully, given the number of potential technical issues\nthat could have gone wrong. I was very happy. It all went very\nsmoothly.\n\n\n\nAlan: It was quite endeavour. I\nremember you said, \u201cHey, we\u2019re doing this thing tomorrow\nmorning. I\u2019m in Toronto.\u201d I cancelled my meetings the morning, I\ncame over there. I went into the hotel \u2014 it was at the Royal York in\nToronto \u2014 and I went upstairs, walked into this room and it was dead\nsilent. And there\u2019s 200 people \u2014 200+ people, there was more than\n200 people, for sure \u2014 and you could hear a pin drop on a carpet.\nAnd it was the strangest thing, because everybody was in VR and\neverybody\u2019s looking in different directions. It was this crazy thing.\nAnd you had this branching narrative. Maybe talk to what that\nbranching narrative was? Right after the experience, you were able to\nshow the information. Walk us through how that came to be.\n\n\n\nJeremy: Yeah, sure. And I like\nyour comment about being able to keep everyone quiet. That was\nactually mentioned as well by by some of the organizers of the\nconference, that they were amazed by this pindrop silence in the\nroom, because obviously it\u2019s very rare. You\u2019ve usually got people\nmessing around on their mobile phones. You got them talking to each\nother, going to get a glass of water, l