TCP092: Making Data An Experience, Spreadsheets Are Dead!

You are listening to the Tech Chef Podcast. This is episode number 92. Monday, March 10, 2025 this show is. Powered by Growth Advisors International network where travel and hospitality companies come to grow.

For more information please visit gainadvisors.com hello, this is Jason Marsh, CEO of Flow Immersive and you're listening to Skip on the Tech Chef Podcast. Off premise Strategy, Business continuity. How about a taste test of restaurant technology?

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Welcome to the Tech Chef Podcast where innovation meets hospitality. I'm Skip Kim, your host and this show is your go to source for the latest trends revolutionizing restaurants, hotels, resorts and entertainment venues. In every episode we explore the cutting edge of hospitality tech. From AI powered solutions to immersive guest experiences and even emerging technologies you might not even be aware of.

We bring you insights from industry pioneers, bold inventors and the minds shaping the future. Whether you're leading operations, passionate about technology or just eager to stay ahead of the curve, this is where inspiration meets action. So grab a seat at the table and let's dig into the future of hospitality. Well, today is the day MRTAC begins.

We dropped this podcast this morning so so you could listen to it on the way to the show and hear about another one of our strategic partners that was just announced today. This is some of the most amazing data visualizations that you will ever see. Jason Marsh, co founder and CEO of Flow Immersive, joins us to talk about their product which is focused on immersive data visualization. What does that mean?

Well, he shares how Flow Immersive started as a vision to manipulate data in 3D space, evolving to utilize utilize AI for real time data interaction. The conversation highlights how immersive data experiences can transform business meetings by making data more engaging and interactive. Jason explains that this technology allows users to visualize complex data sets in a way that is far more comprehensive than traditional charts. The episode dives into the potential applications of this technology in industries like hospitality, emphasizing the importance of collaboration and shared understanding in data driven decisions.

What if you could step inside your data? Jason Marsh reveals how Flow Immersive is revolutionizing data visualization right now right here on the Tech Chef podcast. Mr. Jason Marsh, great to have you on the Tech Chef Podcast.

I am fascinated by your product. The very first day I saw it can you go ahead and share a little bit about your background and how Flow Immersive really came to be. Yeah, thanks, Skip. It's really great to be here.

Flow Immersive started nine years ago. Actually a little bit more than that. I got up at a hackathon and said, I want to build Ironman and anybody who want to join me, come do this thinking. When I said that was being able to manipulate symbolic information, data visualizations, information in 3D space, hopefully with our hands that someday that wasn't.

Hand tracking, wasn't that big a thing back then. I actually didn't realize how important AI would be in that equation. That, Jarvis, is a really fundamental piece of that puzzle. And that virtual reality wasn't as key a use case as augmented reality.

So now today we're actually seeing the results of that vis come together, which is data visualization floating above a table in between us, where we can have a great data conversation and collaboration around it and being able to manipulate it, especially with voice, with an AI that can update the data sets, manipulate, process any way you can think of and spin the data around to make it particularly relevant to the conversation you'd like to have. What was that aha moment that made you realize immersive data visualization was actually the future?

Oh. So one of the first visualizations, first data sets I put into our application as we started to see it come together, was a life expectancy data set for the last 200 years. This data set, just to give you a sense of, I'll paint the picture for you, it's a 3D scatter plot line chart. Across the front width axis is 200 years.

Down the depth axis is 40 or 50 selected countries that I just picked out. And then the height axis is life expectancy. And when you look at this visualization, the first hundred years pretty flat across all the countries, it's life expectancy is around 35. And then around the turn of the last century, around 1900, you start to see this upward curve.

And with some big exceptions, which we'll talk about, but you see this upward curve go all the way to present day where Japan is at 80 years life expectancy. And in seeing that all in one view, I don't have to wait for an animation to play it. It's detailed because it's 3D. We can see so much more detail than you could put on a flat screen.

And when you saw the scope of humanity's increase in life expectancy, it's like humanity's greatest achie, frankly, life Expectancy helps us understand how a society is doing in terms of wars and famine and disease. And to see that success across the entire planet is just an amazing visualization. Then you see the details. You get this big chasm that occurs in 1918 for the Spanish flu across almost every country.

And then you see another chasm, certainly in Europe for the early 1940s, which is World War II. And then you see the basic wrestler curves. But then you see these exceptions. You see this huge plunge in Haiti in 2010 for the earthquake, or 1994 in Rwanda for the genocide.

And you can see so much big picture and so much detail all in one view. I remember being in VR just walking underneath it and exploring and clicking on each dot to see what was going on, each place. And, and that was the, the inspiration. That was the moment.

Like, oh, this is something special. I've never seen anything like this before. And now with AI, each one of those dots or sections, you can actually ask it. You click on a, this plunging point in the, in the data and just ask it what happened here?

And the AI knows what you selected and can start to tell you, you know, more details about what happened at that genocide or, or, you know, AIDS crisis in sub Saharan Africa or whatever it is you're pointing to. All right, I'm getting way ahead of myself here, but to your point, the first time I tried your product, I tried it in on a Magic Leap device. I was in augmented reality. I was blown away.

To be able to walk through the data, to be able to touch data, to be able to look at things in a different way, it is mind blowing. And that kind of brings things around here. We talked about, you know, your historical example, but from a business perspective, how can businesses use this to interpret their data? Actually, a pretty large scope of things that we have done and seen customers use our product for, perhaps supply chains.

An example I've got in mind for a customer right now, where you're looking at raw material sources spread across the globe. You're looking at processing facilities, distribution facilities, and customer sites, whether they're retail or warehousing or whatever. And then just the amount of complexity that goes into a sophisticated product. Say, think of an auto.

Yeah. Think of an automobile, for example. So many parts are coming from so many different places. Being able to see that move, see them moving across the globe.

But it's not just a map. Now, the, you know, certain delays can be represented in a vertical axis or certain financial implications can be represented by the thickness of the lines and how the Lines animate and you're suddenly seeing a set of multi dimensional data that you just, you don't get on a flat screen. But the power of being able to see the relationships across those things. For this particular example that I have in my mind, a customer said, okay, take a weather data set and map that onto the globe on top of it.

So now it's a transparent layer and you can see what kind of impacts that has had. Also with this third dimension, we do something called additional dimensions, which enables you to do, I call them sparklines, where you've got a little, instead of just seeing a dot on a map, you see a little line chart. You know, maybe it's only an inch big or maybe even smaller, but it represents some aspect of the data changing over time. You know, it could be production delays, it could be, you know, costs or even something like a, you know, weather temperature data or something that gives you yet another dimension.

And this is how we see relationships. So, so supply chain is a good example. Financial services being able to see wide set of stocks or other equities laid out on the depth axis, seeing sales data around the country. And I think that's where it really comes down to this, this level of detail.

Right. If you just look at your sales numbers for the year, you know, it's another bar chart, another PowerPoint deck and everybody's falling asleep and oh yeah, yeah, your numbers went up great. But it could be that there's a whole bunch of risk that got lost when you oversimplified that data into a bar chart. And you, so with flow you can start to drill into the quarter, drill into the, the you know, weak, drill into the day, drill into every single transaction because every single transaction can appear on the map to have tens of thousands, 50,000 dots on a map simultaneously with our additional dimensions.

We move it so that the dots don't overlap each other in horrible ways. You can still select any dot and see what that transaction was. And one of the things that you might see is, gee, we had two really big sales the last week of the quarter and the whole quarter's numbers would have been horrible without those. But that got lost in the over summarized PowerPoint slide.

Now I can click, click on that dot, see who it was, see what they bought and understand the risk that, that, you know, that kind of a sales cycle looks like to your business. And you would have lost that risk if you just, you know, used your typical PowerPoint deck. So is this a single user experience or can you show it to a group Just walk me through that. I want to understand if I'm in a professional business scenario, how do I present this data and this really cool aspect and storytelling to other people?

Actually, my first sentence I usually use when I introduce flow is that we've created a data collaboration and conversation environment where we think that it's the best way you can have that data conversation you can imagine. For us, we think that augmented reality is the best way to do that. To float the data above a conference room table, everyone can stand around it with augmented reality or pass through headsets where you can all see the data. Everybody's got a virtual laser pointer.

Everyone can click and interact and explore, do real time filtering. And anytime anyone interacts, everyone sees what they're doing. So it's like having a physical structure, it's a symbolic structure, but we imitate the concreteness of having such a thing in the room. And if someone is remote, they actually also appear in the meeting, in the room as an avatar with a laser pointer.

So whether you're in headsets in the room, whether you're remote in, in some sort of headset, or on a phone or a computer, just on a website, on, through the web, you can also be a member, a fully participating member of that meeting. And it's really the collaboration that stands, stands apart from just building another data visualization, you know, another cool chart, in our opinion. Well, that goes to the point, and don't take offense of this, but is this just a cool new shiny penny in the room or is this truly a business application that's here to stay?

I think a lot of us, a lot of time, we think of technology as cool, but it doesn't need to be anybody who's doing something amazing and impressive. We go cool. Even a cool person has a certain quality to them, right? Well, I have to submit to you that a definition of cool is mastery and control.

Someone who's just nailed that skateboard trick and you just go, wow, that was amazing. That was cool. Because they had control over the, over gravity in a way that's just kind of mind blowing, right? And when you think about Iron man flicking atoms, flicking atoms to create a new element and talking to Jarvis, we vicariously experienced that cool as that.

Mastering control as cool. That's what we've built. I say we encoded that throughout the product. Giving everybody that sense of mastering control is not just a novelty that's going to wear off.

It's how you create efficiency. And the efficiency is building the best possible mental model for yourself and your audience and knowing that they're seeing the data the way you're seeing it, that they're coming up, they've got in their mind a very similar representation to yours. That shared mental model. Yeah, it goes way beyond cool.

That's where we get something that's got really lasting value and is actually going to change the way we think about data for all the knowledge workers of the world. Cool. All right, on that point, we're going to take a little break. When we come back, we're going to dig specifically into enterprise and hospitality applications and start talking to the audience which the majority of our listeners are really in the restaurant and hotel side of it.

And we're going to discover kind of the application side of how it can help them. So everybody hold on, we'll be right back. Hey, since I have you here, if you're headed to Mirtech in Vegas this year, March 10th through 12th, you gotta swing by Magic Gate's experience zone. We're talking next level restaurant tech, VR training that actually works, AR remote support that makes troubleshooting a breeze.

And some seriously cool data tools to keep your ops running smooth. Plus you can mess around with futuristic stuff like augmented reality, virtual reality and haptic devices. It's all hands on, no boring demos, just straight up cool tech that you need to see. Come check it out.

Jason, with Magic 8 focusing on hospitality tech, how do you see immersive data solutions transforming industries like hotels, resorts, restaurants or other entertainment venues? Restaurants and hospitality are such a data driven industry. I mean, you've got this constant set of inputs with labor and food costs and actually changing rapidly, especially food costs these days in the United States. And all of those inputs, data inputs and then the outputs on what the market will bear, what's happening with competitors, what's happening with certain localities.

There's so many inputs into the prices that are charged and the financial bottom line. Those include, you know, supply chains as well as, you know, weather, maybe even impacts that are, you know, happening more often these days with weather, you know, weather related to flights and, you know, airports and challenges there. Being able to see that in a way that helps you make decision to understand what's happening, but even better, understand what kind of risks could be impacting your bottom line in the future.

You need to have great conversations around data and that's what we're focused on. Well, just to give the listeners a little bit of a hint, most of our audience is headed to Mirtech right now, on the plane on their way there, or they could already be in Vegas Flow, Immersive and Magic 8. We've actually constructed a Flow story specific to the restaurant industry. So if you're coming for a demo at the Myrtek XR Experience Zone, this is one of the things that you can see is how you can tell a story with your data, specifically around restaurants.

I think it's going to spark a lot of ideas out there. So that kind of leans into some of the challenges that flow faces when introducing the product to enterprise clients who may be hesitant about XR adoption. What do you have to say to those folks? Well, it has been hard to bring these larger VR headsets into knowledge worker environments, you know, our modern office.

And so there is a new generation of smart glasses that is just coming online now. A number of both small, small companies and some very large ones are, have announced and are showing some of what they're working on. You know, Meta has shown their Orion smart glasses, augmented reality glasses. The, that particular particular next generation device is still a few years out, but there's a, even in these next few months we're going to see a lot of these glasses.

They basically look like glasses, maybe a little thick, you know, but, and this first generation is more likely to be tethered. It will have a, a cable to connect to your phone or, or other computing device. But they're light, they're convenient, they're really, they're see through so you can see the room and everything around you very easily. We see that that change in technology is going to really increase adoption.

And just think of a conference room where you're having a meeting and then use a couple of these or four of these pairs of glasses sitting on the conference room table. And the presenter says, okay, we're gonna do the data, data portion now. Grab your glasses, put them on and there's the data. You have that conversation for 15, 20, 30 minutes around the data.

That feels like a very different thing than struggling to get into a VR headset and understand the controllers and all of that kind of thing. That's a big one way we're really overcoming some of the barriers to adoption then AI is huge. Just being able to talk to the data and have it reprocess it and answer your questions and show you. It's not just verbal questions, verbal answers that come back.

It'll actually just throw it back into 3D space. You can see that, hey, we've isolated on this point, that point and we've run this, you know, Python code to, you know, process to find the, you know, averages or Means or, or relationships, the ease of use and power, thinking of mastering control, the power of, in the hands of the end users is just really fabulous. And that bar of power and ease of use, that's where we start to scale. So do you see the future of XR driven data visualization really becoming a standard such as PowerPoint, or do you think this is still.

It's going to be a little more focused. I do believe eventually we will be getting rid of monitors. That day is coming, similar to the day of getting rid of phones. I don't believe you'll be holding that rectangular device in your hands, just your thoughts on where it's headed and where this plays out in the future.

I think seeing our information around us in an appropriate level of detail for most of our day is going to feel just very natural. I just wrote an article a couple of weeks ago and I call it the Future of Data is Human and the Future of Technology is Human, where the technologies just kind of disappears instead of. For all these years, we have modified our human, modified the human in order to interact with technology instead of the other way around. And a spoken interface with something that really takes advantage of the way our brains view information and think about symbolic information.

That combination feels like magic. It no longer feels like high tech. It just does what you want it to do in, in the way you want it want to do it. Your brain is no longer translating 2D screens into 3D, you know, rich mental models because.

And it's, that's what it does. That's what we do right now. And, and we've all gotten used to flat screens, but that's not the way our brains think. That's not the way our brains evolved.

And so as we get closer to this, to this vision of smart glasses with augmented reality and a spoken interface, that magic really settles in and just becomes part of the normal human experience. So since you're building Iron man out in the background, if you could fast forward five years, what do you hope that Flow Immersive will actually have achieved? I can hope, I can dream. That will be an important part of the boardrooms throughout America and the world and a natural part of how we interact with our Fitbit data, our weather data, our stock data, our fantasy football data.

It's just the way we're used to seeing the things that, the symbolic information that helps us keep our lives organized and engaging. So as we start to wind down the show, let's talk about the devices that Flow works on. Do you need a headset device? Can you run it on a computer?

What does that scenario look like? You can run it on almost any device now and certainly very comfortably on a computer with a browser. On a phone again in a browser on Android it's single click and you see it in augmented reality on your phone. With Apple devices you need to have a augmented reality aware browser.

They're free and open source to grab one of those. But it's got to work really well on existing phones and flat screen browsers or laptops. Then in addition to that, it's a really beautiful experience on the Meta Quest headsets, on the HTC Vive headsets. Some nice advantages to those due to security, especially in some enterprise situations that's there's real value in the HTC product line around that works beautifully on Magic Leap and we're working on the implementations right now for these next generation of smart glasses and we'll be able to be talking about those in a short number of months.

Oh, we might have to talk offline about that because the audiences seeing some really cool augmented reality devices at the show that I'll have there. So let's continue that discussion. Speaking of which, just this morning, right before the kickoff of Mirtech 2025, we announced our strategic partnership between Magic8 and Flow Immersive. What excites you the most about partnering with us and how do you see that really benefiting the hospitality segment?

Having someone of your expertise to help us, you know, really dig in and get beyond the cool, get beyond the proof of concepts into real world, even mission critical use cases. There's no way we could do that without that kind of expertise. So partnerships for Flow are incredibly important and what you've accomplished so far and what we'll accomplish together is, yeah, is very exciting. We are extremely excited to be able to present this to our clients and other colleagues.

I just want people to experience the technology and that's really part of the experience zone that we're creating is we just want people to see cool tech. We don't want them to sit through a boring demo. We want them to experience a different way of looking at things. And this for sure.

I'm a data guy, so I guess maybe that's why I'm so excited about this product because this is a completely different way of not only looking at the data, but being part of the data, if that makes sense. You know, as you walk through that experience you are embedded in it, which brings a whole different mindset to how you look at things. It goes back a little bit to that human, those human factors and the feeling of this experience is so different than a PowerPoint. Even just the interactivity and having everyone engaged in the meeting instead of sitting back looking at their watch, that alone is hugely different.

But yeah, our brains love to see, see color and patterns and then if it's at the same time ways that we can help make better decisions to run our businesses, then it just feels like a huge win all the way around. Well, and I know Bill Morton's sitting in the back of this conversation listening, so Bill has been amazing, walking me through how to program the system, how to bring in data sets and all the little intricacies that you've developed. Jason, with the colors and the different types of charts and the transition, that's extremely important, the transition and the animation in between the charts helps to really emphasize some of the visuals that you're seeing.

So fantastic product, fantastic company you have. Thank you so much for partnering with us. We're really excited about this and I can't wait to share some of the excitement that we had at the show and share it with you and your team and look forward to a long, successful relationship with each other. Wowee, wow, wow, wow.

Talk about innovation. And guess what? If you are headed to the show today, you too can witness this amazing data visualization tool. If you have any questions for me or any of our guests, we'd love to hear from you.

You can find me at booth number 305 over the next couple of days or you can reach out to me on social media. I Skip Kimple and MagicGate Tech. We're on X, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. For past episodes and show notes.

Head over to Skip Kimble.com and to catch all the latest episodes, visit MagicGate.com and of course you can always reach out to me directly via email. Skip magic8.

com so I got a big question for you. Did you book your demo spot for the show? If not, you need to. We are fully booked for today and tomorrow we just open up a couple more spots.

So reach out to me if you want to get in on this tech revolution. Everybody have a great show and I look forward to seeing you on the flip side. Make sure you come by the booth and say hello. Next Tuesday we will be doing a Murtech recap show.

So until then, stay safe, stay healthy and stay hungry. My friends, are you ready to level up your tech game and understand the world of xr? Dive into the world of extended reality with Magic Gate's XR Bootcamp Master the concepts of virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality in just weeks. No special equipment or previous knowledge is required.

Limited seats are available to sign up now at bootcamp.magicgate.com that's bootcamp.magicgate.

com your future in XR starts there.