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It wasn\u2019t long ago that the concept\nof having a personal relationship with computers was the stuff of\nscience fiction \u2014 everything from HAL 9000 to V\u2019Ger posited a\nfar-out future when that would start to happen. Well, according to\nMike Pell \u2014 author of THE AGE OF SMART INFORMATION \u2014 that time is\nnow. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlan: Welcome to the XR for\nBusiness Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today\u2019s guest is\nsomebody absolutely spectacular. Mr. Mike Powell, he is the head of\nthe Microsoft Garage and the author of \u201cAge of Smart\nInformation,\u201d a new book about how artificial intelligence and\nspatial computing will transform the way we communicate forever. Find\nthe latest on Mike at futuristic.com and excerpts from his new book,\nat theageofsmartinformation.com. \n\n\n\n\nMike, welcome to the show.\n\n\n\nMike: Thank you, Alan. My\npleasure to be here.\n\n\n\nAlan: It\u2019s so exciting. I was\ngifted your book actually by a good friend of mine, John Bizzell. And\nwe had lunch and he\u2019s \u201cOh, you haven\u2019t read this book.\u201d And\nI guess he sent it to me on Amazon. I got it the next day, and I\u2019ve\nbeen just voraciously reading this book since, I\u2019m about halfway\nthrough. But man, your book has really opened my eyes to how\neverything around us will not only have the data available, but it\u2019ll\nbe in context to our personal needs. And it\u2019s really incredible. So\nhow did you\u2013 just kind of walk us through your journey of how you\nwent from inventing PDFs, to writing books on smart information?\n\n\n\nMike: It\u2019s a long story, but\nI\u2019ll try to keep it really short. You\u2019re right, a lot of this did\nsort of form when I was back in the early 90s when I was working on\nAcrobat with some of my friends at Adobe. Back then, when we were\nworking on the very first electronic documents for interchange, it\nwas very apparent that people were not going to enjoy reading these\nthings like sitting upright and being uncomfortable. You really\nneeded some hardware and software that didn\u2019t exist at that point to\nenjoy the information, right. To enjoy whether it was book or\ndocuments or reports, whatever it is you were reading. And so at that\ntime, I started to think a lot about how the information itself \u2014\nyou know, the thing that we were reading \u2014 was so dead and lifeless.\nI guess it was amazing that you could now transfer to other places\nwhen people around the world could see exactly what you were trying\nto say. But the thoughts about how there was always more to it\nstarted to percolate back then. And over my career, I\u2019ve always had\nthe good fortune of working on the leading edge of technology. So I\nwas very early into 3D and interactive graphics and visualization,\nand I started to do a lot of experiments with bringing information to\nlife. I\u2019ve always been fascinated with communications, helping people\ncommunicate as clearly as they can. And so that was really the start\nof a lot of this, was trying to see what we can do to help people be\nable to understand and communicate better by using the information,\nthe things that we create every day, whether that\u2019s tweets or emails\nor books or movies or music, doesn\u2019t matter. Whatever the medium is\nthat you\u2019re communicating in, there\u2019s always so much more that can be\nbrought out that we as people understand inherently, but yet are\nnever reflected in that final form, that piece of communication comes\nin. So that\u2019s where we started.\n\n\n\nAlan: So let\u2019s unpack that. So,\nyou know, I\u2019m reading a PDF, then you guys probably added the ability\nto have hyperlinks and then what else can you add. Now you\u2019re looking\nat, \u201cOK, what does the world look like when the computers are no\nlonger bound by the 16 by 9 rectangular shape?\u201d