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b'The VR experience Firing Barry by Talespin is getting a lot of press lately, and on the surface, it may look like a slightly uncanny valley way to train someone how to give an old fella the can. But Talespin CEO Kyle Jackson tells Alan it\\u2019s more than that; it\\u2019s a tool to help humans flex their core competencies in everything from leadership skills to confidence-building.\\xa0\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: Hey, everybody, Alan\\nSmithson here, the XR for Business Podcast. Coming up next, Kyle\\nJackson, founder of Talespin. You may have seen Barry the virtual\\nhuman that you can fire in real life. We\\u2019ll be talking to them about\\ntheir enterprise software solutions that leverage immersive\\ntechnology to transform the way global workforces, learn, work,, and\\ncollaborate. We\\u2019ll also be discussing how you can use immersive\\ntechnologies as an assessment tool to better prepare your workforce\\nfor exponential growth. All that and more on the XR for Business\\nPodcast. Kyle, welcome to the show, my friend.\\n\\n\\n\\nKyle: Hey. Thanks, Alan. Thanks\\nfor having me.\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: Oh, it\\u2019s so exciting. Ever\\nsince I saw the video that popped up of Barry, the lovable older\\ngentleman avatar that you can fire. How did that come about? Tell us\\nabout Talespin, and how did you get here, where you are now?\\n\\n\\n\\nKyle: Yeah, Barry became famous\\nvery quickly, because it\\u2019s such an ironic idea. And that\\u2019s really\\nwhat I think caught people\\u2019s attention; the idea that you could use\\nvirtual humans for soft skills training was something that just\\nseemed sci-fi and ironic. But then once you started to peel back the\\nlayers of it, it just starts to make a lot of sense.So how we got\\nthere, was we started looking at all of the future skills gaps,\\nsurveys, research, everything that was surfacing from the Shift\\nCommission, to the World Economic Forum, to McKinsey Global\\nInstitute. And we just kept seeing \\u2014 obviously opposite AI and\\nautomation and robotics, all the things that are going on one side of\\ntechnology \\u2014 that there was this increasing index toward soft skills\\nfor some of the most underserved areas for businesses going forward.\\nWe\\u2019re building this platform which is supposed to help transfer\\nskills and really align us to the future of work. And every single\\nsurvey says soft skills is one of the things we should be looking at.\\nAnd we went, \\u201cWow, is there anything we can do there?\\u201d The\\nthing that was most important for us in thinking about that was we\\nhave to hit emotional realism to do this. This isn\\u2019t like a\\npoint-and-click replacement. It needs to be something that when I\\u2019m\\nsitting in there and I\\u2019m opposite Barry or any other virtual human\\nnow, that I believe the emotions and the frustration and all the\\nthings that are thrown at me. And to do that kind of at scale. From\\nboth an assessment standpoint, content, and deployment to large\\ncompanies.\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: So how did you guys\\novercome the Uncanny Valley of Barry? I\\u2019ve seen so many human avatars\\nthat are almost there, but they got that creepy feeling. And if\\nyou\\u2019re going for emotional realism, creepy is not what you want on\\nthe delivery side.\\n\\n\\n\\nKyle: No. Well, we kind of\\npulled up short in our opinion. So we were pushing further than where\\nwe landed. And you can get to even more photo-real than Barry is. But\\nsoon as you do, you start to push over that ledge and it starts to\\nreally be creepy. We\\u2019re kind of right in the sweet spot of north of\\nPixar, but not hitting realism. And that seems to work. We focused a\\nlot on micro-expressions and figuring out like a programmatic way to\\nadd a lot of micro-expression to the silent moments too, because I\\nthink one of the things that technologists immediately do is we had\\nto figure out how to do animation systems, lip sync systems and\\nthings like that for when people are t'