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Your various realities \u2014 virtual, augmented, X, etc \u2014 are often talked about in the realm of vision, since we humans lean on vision as our major sense. But the folks at Bose, like today\u2019s guest Michael Ludden, know that there\u2019s room for sound in XR too.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlan: Welcome to the XR for\nBusiness Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today\u2019s guest is\nMichael Ludden, global head of developer advocacy and principal\naugmented reality advocate at Bose Technologies. Michael is a\ntechnologist, futurist, strategist, product leader, and developer\nplatform expert who loves to operate on the bleeding edge of what\u2019s\npossible, and is a frequent keynote speaker at events around the\nworld. Michael was previously director of IBM\u2019s Watson\u2019s Developer\nLab for a AR and VR, among some other career stops. To learn more\nabout the work he\u2019s doing at Bose, you can visit developer.bose.com.\n\n\n\nMichael, welcome to the show.\n\n\n\nMichael: Wow, what an intro.\nThanks for having me.\n\n\n\nAlan: It\u2019s my absolute pleasure\nand honor to have you on the show. I\u2019m super excited. I was talking\nto all fine and last week. I was flying from Toronto to San\nFrancisco, and I just happened to sit beside a guy who we started\ntalking about AR and I pulled out the North Glasses. He pulled out\nthe Bose Frames; we swap. And we had this kind of meeting of the\nminds. I had the visual, he had the audio and it was really cool that\nI got to try the Bose Frames. What an amazing piece of technology.\n\n\n\nMichael: Glad you liked it.\n\n\n\nAlan: So you\u2019ve had a storied\ncareer here. You\u2019ve done everything from IBM Watson, to Google, to\nHTC, Samsung. How did you end up in technology, and why did you get\nso fascinated on futurism?\n\n\n\nMichael: Well, it\u2019s sort of been\na running theme in my life. I read a lot of science fiction as a kid\nand I was always interested in technology and \u2014 not to date myself\n\u2014 but at a certain point in my life when I was a young adult,\ntechnology started to really aggressively eat everything, starting\nwith mobile. And I just found that was really the point of inflection\nin my life where I studied musical theater in college, I went to\nUCLA. I thought that\u2019s what I was going to do. I really did. And I\ndid get a B.A. so I got a little arts education, too. And at the same\ntime, I was always tinkering with stuff, building my own PCs. I\nstarted my own web development company at one point to make Web sites\nin Flash, CS2, and CS3 in the early days; it was brutal.\n\n\n\nAlan: There\u2019s a conference in\nToronto called Flash in the Can; FITC.\n\n\n\nMichael: Nice.\n\n\n\nAlan: That\u2019s old school.\n\n\n\nMichael: It is very old school.\nAnd, you know, I never really thought I\u2019d make a career out of it,\nbut I needed money. I was a starving actor in L.A. and one of my\nfriends who I just made by being nerdy, worked for a company called\nHTC. They were releasing the first-ever Android phone, which was\ncalled The Dream \u2014 or the G1 in the US. So I was in contact with\nthis guy; he got a promotion. He said, \u201cyou should take my old\njob,\u201d which was L.A.-based, and I was living there. And I said,\n\u201cI want to do it.\u201d I was working on a podcasting platform\ncalled This Week In \u2014 not This Week in Tech \u2014 but This Week In. It\nwas a Jason Calacanis-led network out of the old Mahalo Studios in\nSanta Monica. But it paid me pennies. And when they told me what the\njob paid and what I\u2019d be doing, I said, \u201cOK, I guess I\u2019ll do\nit.\u201d I needed the money, and it was very flexible. It felt\nreally easy to me, like that\u2019s really all you need me to d