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When you\u2019ve been a journalist on the\nXR technology beat for 20 years, like VentureBeat\u2019s lead writer Dean\nTakahashi has, you develop a hunch or two about the direction the\nindustry might go. Alan picks Dean\u2019s brain for a few such scoops.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlan: Thank you for joining the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson, today\u2019s guest is the one and only Dean Takahashi, the lead writer for VentureBeat. He\u2019s been a tech journalist for more than 28 years, and he\u2019s covered games for a twenty one of those years. He\u2019s authored two books: Opening the XBox, and The XBox 360 Uncloaked. He organizes the annual GamesBeat and GamesBeat Summit conferences. To learn more, you can visit games beat dot com or venture beat dot com. \n\n\n\nDean, welcome to the show, my friend.\n\n\n\nDean: Thank you. And thank you\nfor having me.\n\n\n\nAlan: It\u2019s my absolute pleasure.\nWe had the distinct opportunity to meet at AWE this year for a very\nshort amount of time. I think we rode the escalator down? But I\u2019ve\nbeen a big fan of yours for a long time. I read the articles that you\nwrite, and they\u2019re very insightful. They\u2019re very factual. I\u2019m just\nvery honored to have you on the show. So, thank you very much.\n\n\n\nDean: Thank you. Nice, and happy\nto hear.\n\n\n\nAlan: How did you start\u2026 first\nof all, I guess you\u2019ve been in the games world for a long time. How\ndid you kind of pivot over to VentureBeat, and what is VentureBeat?\nLet\u2019s let\u2019s unpack what VentureBeat is, for people that may or may\nnot know?\n\n\n\nDean: Yeah, I was sort of a traditional newspaper and magazine journalist for a long time, and then, when the web came along and people started podcasting and blogging, I looked around and felt like it was less of a risk to go try something new than it was to stay at a newspaper. I was at the San Jose newspaper at the time. So about 11 years ago, I joined VentureBeat, and it had been started two years earlier by Matt Marshall, who was a venture capital writer for the Mercury News and an early blogger as well. And so, we were a tech news blog and competed at the time with likes of GIGO, and TechCrunch. They have been either\u2026 gone away, or they they\u2019ve been acquired by larger companies. So we\u2019re still one of the last, larger independent tech blogs. \n\n\n\nAnd then within that, when I joined about eleven years ago, we started GamesBeat as well, as sort of a subsection that focused on games. At the very beginning, we were sort of a startup and venture capital site. But now we pretty much cover the gamut of tech news and game news. And then, our particular vertical focuses are artificial intelligence on the tech side, and then the whole game sector. And then, I guess as far as getting into VR and AR, I\u2019ve really followed the news. I remember seeing the Oculus guys \u2014 Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell and Brendan (Iribe) over at one of their CES tables in the early years, well before they were acquired. I think I even tried to get an interview with John Carmack, like, the day after he did a demo at E3. The next day, he was gone. So I was on the hunt kind of early. Never quite the absolute first person to dive into VR.\n\n\n\nAlan: But very close. You\u2019ve\nseen it from pre-DK1 days \u2014 where [it was] probably a\ncobbled-together a collection of flat screens, wires, and duct tape\n\u2014 and what it is today, where you have real consumer-grade virtual\nreality that\u2019s not even connected to computers. You\u2019ve seen a lot\nover the years. You\u2019ve written countless articles on virtual and\naugmented reality. Is there anything that you may have written about\nbefore that you couldn\u2019t have predicted, that has happened already?\n\n\n\nDea