Driving Brand Empathy Through Immersive Storytelling with Amir Berenjian

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And so it's just two images and one is slightly tilted to represent the different vantage point. And so that's what we do with the camera. So we have a, you know, it's 8K per eye, so 16K, 90 frames per second, really remarkable resolution, like getting close to basically 20/20. Vision, and then it's like your head is actually physically there where the camera was capturing that footage. And so to your point, we've, we've focused on stuff we can film today, but the concept of being able to go back in time or even go into the future is, is brilliant. And there has been a lot of other people that have, that have taken that approach. And with AI now too, like I think I just saw today, actually Google Maps announced that you can go into Google Maps and through prompting envision places, what they were like in the past or in the future. I might have misread that, but I think, I think that's what I, what I saw, which makes perfect sense.

Step into the world of success with Your Brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. I am really thrilled today about my guest who spent 12 years in investment banking and had more than 100 M&A transactions, companies from $10 million to over $1 billion in revenue. And this guest was really good at putting a number on things. Then he walked away and started something you can't put on a spreadsheet. Amir Barinjian is the co-founder and CEO of REM5 Studios, an immersive technology company in Minneapolis that builds virtual and augmented reality experiences for brands and causes. And I wanna be clear about what that actually means because it's not a tech demo. They've put together more than 150,000 people inside a story. Across 100+ live events in more than 20 countries on 4 continents. They've built for the Gates Foundation, Rotary International, American Cancer Society, Target, General Mills, Minnesota Twins. Their film, Polio's Last Mile, shot in Zambia, has been deployed at the World Health Assembly, at Global Citizen, at Rotary conventions around the world, and was one of the first experiences of its kind built for Apple Vision Pro. The work's been covered by a number of amazing large media companies, and they've also picked up a lot of international awards along the way. But here's what I really want to talk about, selling emotion to clients who need proof and figuring out how to give it to them. So I'm really thrilled and humbled that you, Amir, have decided to be on Your Brand Amplified. So thank you and thank you for coming to us from Minneapolis, which one doesn't necessarily think of as the immersive tech capital.

Thank you for having me and I will say that we are not the immersive tech capital, but we're, we're doing our best to put our name on the map. So appreciate you, uh, having me. Look forward to the discussion.

Yeah, well, let's start with that transition from your very different worlds, right? How different are they going from one industry into now creating technologies to help with brand storytelling and storytelling about these diseases and needs for infrastructure and other issues that are happening all over the world.

Yeah, for sure. I think depending on the day, I could say that there are a lot of through lines between my two professional journeys. And in other days I'm like, Amir, you're just telling yourself that there is, I have nothing to do with each other. So, but I think it's like, it's like anybody, you know, we get caught putting people in a box with their skill sets in a box. But the reality is most people have a lot of interests and a lot of things they're good at that. Might not be related to one another. But in terms of what I was doing in investment banking, it was actually— you hear the word banking and you think numbers, which is a prerequisite. You know, I was all right with numbers, but the type of investment banking that I was in was around mergers and acquisitions. So helping family-owned businesses sell their business or find investors for them. And at the end of the day, that is like a much more emotional transaction than you would ever imagine. And you can pencil out all the numbers, but at the end of the day, when it's, you know, grandpa's business or the business that they started, it doesn't matter what the dollars and cents say. There's a lot of emotion involved there. And so most of that role ends up managing emotions and telling the story of that business. And if you're a good storyteller in investment banking and M&A, you're going to get a higher valuation because people on the other side are going to believe in the future of that story that you're telling, which ultimately equates to more dollars and cents, for better or for worse. So that's what I did for 12 years. Learned a lot, got to work with a lot of them. One thing about Minnesota and Minneapolis is we have a lot of boring businesses that are really successful. Yeah. So if you look around, you know, look around your house, every little screw and widget and thing and machine that made the thing that you see in your house. We have a lot of those types of companies. So got to see behind the, the closed doors at those businesses, which is just fun as a 20-year-old, right? Like you're just taking in a lot of information and real-world information. And then as I kind of got to a, a point in my career where you had a time to, had a, had a few moments to kind of step back and say, what do I actually want to do next? Or what do I actually want to do when I, when I grow up? And kind of saw the path as to where I was going. Right around that time, I happened to have tried the latest wave of immersive technologies. So this is a little company called Oculus. They had a Rift, uh, Oculus Rift was the kind of really clunky headset that they launched in 2016 and had an opportunity to try it and just really became excited about what the future of human-computer interaction would look like. And what the future of storytelling would look like. Because how many times, even when selling these businesses, you try to tell the story of the impact that these businesses make on their customers, and you try to put that in words in a PowerPoint, and you wish you could just grab them and bring them to the facility and walk them through it to meet the, the, the people that have been working there for 25, 30 years, and then bring them to one of their customers and have their customers show the emotional, like the, the emotional impact that their product has on them. And then I'm sitting here with this technology and I'm like, it's not quite there yet, but you can see a path going to where that's what you can do with this technology. You can democratize that experience. You can literally transport somebody. It's the Magic School Bus that we, that we all watched as a, as a kid. And so, so that was when my journey into immersive technology began. Wow.

I am slightly familiar with immersive technology. I have friends' company out here that's done things from Microsoft Pride, that's done things for Burning Man, as well as Breonna Taylor, a program called Breonna's Garden, where you can immerse yourself into a garden and learn about her. So there are some really great uses, and these of course are a little bit different than what a lot of the work that you're doing is, but being able to be in, put yourself into an experience when you can't necessarily travel there, right? Yourself offers such a rich experience for all of us. So can you talk a little bit about deciding to make that shift and what that looked like at the beginning? You know, how hard was it to get people to believe that this was a great way to get their brands across or get their message across to get that funding or to, to reach their goals?

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's still an uphill battle today, 10 years later as we sit here in 2026, we get caught up in the technology. We get caught up in buzzwords. You know, there's augmented reality, there's virtual reality, there's spatial computing, there's XR, MR. I wish we could just throw all of that away. Because it doesn't articulate to the average person like what the value of these tools are. And that just takes time with any other technology, right? Like we don't talk about the, like the infrastructure of the internet and the nuances of the internet anymore, right? But maybe we did 20 years ago. And now it's just part of our daily life. And so in terms of the transition, I would say that it feels like the transition is still ongoing. I haven't completed it. 10 years later, but we've come a long way in the last 10 years. I think that for, for me, it was, if I wanted to do storytelling and produce software and experiences in this space, I still needed to learn a lot more about the technology and the ecosystem and who the suppliers were, where the demand is coming from, what the best use cases are, what's good VR, what's bad VR., do people like VR better or augmented reality better? How do we address some of these criticisms? And so we actually started with a physical space to address the accessibility issue. Because 10 years ago you couldn't buy a really high-end headset and just take it out of the box and boom, it worked at your home. It was much more expensive. And so we're like, let's outsource that. Let's be what a computer lab was back in the day. Again, explaining this to my young children that we had like computer labs at school is even like a laughable thing. And I'm aging myself and I feel terribly old when I have these conversations with my, with my children. But that's what we did with VR, right? And so even if you're a Fortune 500 company, if you can just drive up the street to test a bunch of things with your team and everything's already set up and it works, that takes so much friction out of the equation at the time and just the cost burden too of doing so. And so back to your original question, we kind of had two parts to the business. I was like, we want to approach this enterprise side and this education, learning, storytelling, this, this broader bucket, but we need to get people into headsets first because that is where the magic happens. And so that's where our trick was pizza and beer. Because most people, like I'm looking out into this patio here, pizza and beer sells. It's timeless and doesn't matter if you're an executive or a middle management or a, a junior person, right? That's, that's usually a pretty easy sale. And so we hosted a lot of corporate events where we, we had really high-end stuff and we went after the companies that were looking to do fun and interesting things, but could have a little educational twist. Twist on it. And so once we got them in the door, drinking, eating, get a headset on, and they all have the same exact reaction. I mean, we put so many people into VR that were either had, had no preconceived notions or had very strong feelings one way or the other. But as soon as they put the headset on, everybody's like, oh my gosh, this is nothing like what I had expected. It feels so real. Or I forgot I was in there. Or can I try this, and you also found that like the stereotypical people that you thought would enjoy this technology weren't the ones that were falling in love with it. It was the people that were the non-tech people, the non-gamers, the, oh, that's not for me, that's not my thing. They were like, oh my gosh, this is very intuitive and easy to use and I love it and it's a ton of fun and it brings a smile to my face. And then that opens the door for all these more meaningful discussions 'cause people take off the headset, The, if you have a pulse, the wheel starts spinning in terms of, oh my gosh, we could use this for this and that. And then collecting all that data and understanding where the demand is, and then really kind of moving into the production side of the business.

And when you started, you were targeting the business side first, and then the cause side came next, or what did that look like when you were deciding who we're going to target? What we're going to focus on.

Yeah, I mean, originally it was like we had a bunch of ideas of where we thought it could go out of the gates. Had a lot of experience with nonprofits and, and had sat on nonprofit boards and, you know, understand that world and knew there would be an opportunity there. But really bigger picture, we were just trying to put out a beacon for all things immersive technology, right? Like, let's be a beacon in the community. There's a lot of interesting people doing interesting things and let's just see where that takes us. And right out of the gates, organically, a lot of our friends, and then what ended up turning into business were in the more cause and purpose oriented spaces. And it fit very, very well, right? Like they're trying to tell a story. Think of every fundraiser you've ever been to or time you've tried to raise capital for a cause. Right? Again, back to what I was saying earlier, you wish you could grab their hand and bring them along with you on a journey to, to see what you have seen. And now we can finally do that with, with the technology. And so organically it just worked. The trickier part there is the economics of it, right? Within the nonprofit world and in the K through 12 education world, this technology is a, is a obvious Wow. Yes, this fits. Let's push forward and see where we can find the most value, but funding is always, always a challenge. And so that was a slow burn to get that moving. And then, you know, we were fortunate enough to develop some relationships with some other private or public enterprises that the marketing teams typically have a little bit more of a budget than, than your average nonprofit. And so it was kind of finding that balance along the way.

Yeah. And that was actually the next question I was gonna touch on is economics because I've worked with nonprofits as well at the local level, at the national level, overseas, and the budgets vary widely, even though this is something that would be an obvious yes for anybody who's trying to get funding. So have the costs of technology gone down or has the technology shifted since you started 10 years ago? And you know, what are those other barriers to entry perhaps for somebody who knows this is something they need in their toolbox?

Yeah, I think there's two big buckets. There's the actual tangible cost side, and I think the costs have gone down significantly. The fact that today you can buy a $400 headset, like a Meta Quest 3 is where we run most of our clients today. If you would've told me 10 years ago that that existed for $400 or $500, I would've thought you were crazy, right? I mean, you put on the headset, it's completely standalone. It's not plugged into a computer. It's not, doesn't need the internet. It's not plugged into power, completely standalone. It's comfortable. It's fairly lightweight. It uses hand tracking for all of your interactions if you wanted to and plays in very high resolution. So pretty remarkable. The other piece is on the production side. It's like most technology. We have found a lot of different operational efficiencies over time in doing a lot of the same types of engagements with our, with our clients. So we can kind of build that backend infrastructure that will lower costs. But then also at the same time, every time a new headset comes out, the quality demand goes higher. And so it's just that constant. Chicken and egg that we're working through, but overall the trend is moving in the right direction. But I would say bigger for me, and it sounds cliché, but I'll say it, is the perception of value needs a complete rebranding in immersive. Because for instance, the vast majority of our clients today are using these experiences at trade shows. So you go to a trade show, And everyone's got a different trinket or a different video or a different thing. And you maybe go by, you grab the candy, you say hi, you grab a flyer, you keep going kind of thing. When we're there with immersive tech, in a lot of cases, we kind of steal the show, which is good and bad, but we're very tired by the end of these days because we're constantly engaged in— people want to engage, they want to have conversations. They're curious. Hey, what's that? I want to try it. Can I try it? Sure. Of course. Course, and then when they take the headset off, they're not talking about the technology. Like, that's not our goal. They're talking about what they experienced and they wanna stay. They just had an experience and their friend just had the same one. So now they had a shared experience that they want to talk about. Right. And so we're building these in a way where if you're a client, you can use it at one event, then you can use that the next event, then you can use that the next event. And I think not to knock on the trade show industry, but in seeing a lot of behind the scenes over the last 5, 6 years, there's a lot of waste there and there's a lot of expense that doesn't leave that showroom floor, right? And so I would challenge folks that even to produce really high-end immersive technology like we do today. I don't think it is— I know it's actually less expensive than a lot of the other status quo expenses and cost structure that are built into a lot of these trade shows. And I think the results are even higher.

Walk us through that ex— so you've told us about like the trade show experience, and would that typically be a brand?

Yeah, a brand or any organization that is trying to tell a story. Right? So every, any, on any given day, there's a trade show. Again, a world I wasn't super familiar with, but it is a massive, massive space and still a massive space. COVID obviously took a little bit of a blip, but there's trade shows for everything and there's people there and they're trying to tell their story so they can sell a product or a service or whatever it may be. Right? So we've done work with a company that is a manufacturer of cheese, really high-end cheese. And if you think about what they're trying to tell in terms of their story, they're telling the story of Joe the farmer, a third-generation farmer in Wisconsin who's been doing this for, uh, him and his family for 100 years. This is the character that they take, and fast forward to the piece of cheese you have in your hand, that's what gives it that profound, unique, premium flavor, right? And that's the story right now they're trying to tell on, uh, packaging or on a piece of paper or maybe a 2D video. But why don't we actually put you in a headset and bring you to that farm and hear it from them and see the cows and be there and have that sense of presence and you can feel it when you're there, right? The same reason that like when you go take a wine tour, you visit a winery or vineyard, the wine tastes better when you're there for some reason, right? Than when you drink it at home, right? Or it's the old adage, like a piña colada is always going to taste better on the beach, right? Than at home. And so, so our minds are like very powerful in terms of you know, our, our senses are all working together indirectly and directly. And we also have a lot of implicit things that are going on that we don't really fully understand. And so that's an example of how a brand has used the technology all the way to a very similar process, but a very different use case. When we do work with the Gates Foundation, one of their initiatives, biggest initiatives, and has been for a very long time, is the eradication of polio. And so polio in the US in particular, in a lot of wealthy nations is something that, you know, if you're over the age of 45, you probably maybe don't even know what polio is anymore because we had, have eradicated it so long ago from these certain continents, but it's still a major problem. And until it's done, it's not done. And so in the noise of today's world, how do you get big How do you get big policymakers to pay attention to this issue? Well, same deal. We can go to, in this case, the Democratic Republic of Congo or Zambia and document these frontline healthcare workers and the challenges that they're going through, and then bring that to Global Health Summit or UN General Assembly meetings and actually transport these people in these boardrooms looking at these charts to these places. So in one case, it's cheese and cow. And in the other case, it's policymakers and bringing them to the front lines of the fight against polio. So two very different use cases, but very similar methodology in the way that we're deploying the technology.

And I imagine for a use, for a case for 12 Institution, it could be going back in history and actually getting to be in an environment, perhaps?

Totally.

Yeah.

Yeah, for us, I mean, what, what we really focused on is immersive video. So we do like interactive augmented reality. So like if you're trying to, like for instance, another project that we're working on is around medical oxygen supply. And so instead of seeing a video of, you know, a really cool graphic of how oxygen is manufactured and then how that's transported out to the the field, we have a, a 3D interactive tabletop model that the user can play with and they have to solve some problems, right? So you're having to like creatively think and there's some tactile feedback. And then we pair that with immersive video. So we capture video on really high resolution cameras that have two lenses that represent your eyes. And so when you watch it in the headset, it feels 3D because it's actually capturing the the two different perspectives. Do you remember like, uh, the View-Master as a kid?

Yes.

The, the toy.

Yeah.

Yeah. So like that, it's really funny if you wanna chuckle, like the ads for that in the '50s were like, this is gonna revolutionize travel. This is gonna revolutionize education. All we're doing today now is the digital version of that. And so it's just two images and one is slightly tilted to represent the different vantage point. And so that's what we do with the camera. So we have a, you know, it's 8K per eye, so 16K, 90 frames per second, really remarkable resolution, like getting close to basically 20/20 vision. And then it's like your head is actually physically there where the camera was capturing that footage. And so to your point, we've focused on stuff we can film today, but the concept of being able to go back in time or even go into the future is, is brilliant. And there has been a lot of other people that have, that have taken that approach. And, and with AI now too, like, I think I just saw today actually Google Maps announced that you can go into Google Maps and through prompting envision places, what they were like in the past or in the future. I might've misread that, but I think, I think that's what I, what I saw, which makes perfect sense.

Right. Okay, I'm gonna have to look that up because that's, that's, I feel like every single day several articles come out about new ways to use innovations in technology. And what you're really talking about is we think about these things. Yes, people, there are Meta glasses, people, you know, there's all this stuff about people wearing them out and about. And if you're videoing somebody without consent and all those kind of issues, you're talking about doing, using this technology for good and impact. And you're also taking it beyond novelty. So we may know one or two people who have Meta Ray-Bans or something, but you're taking a different technology, right? And you are really taking it from that novelty of, oh, a couple people use this, but it's not a big deal right now, into more of presence, the storytelling, like we, we, you've mentioned. Making sure people feel what's going on around and that they really start feeling emotional towards the topic so that they want to create a change, whether it is buy this cheese for their store or whether it is, hey, let's donate some money and figure out how to eradicate that something or build infrastructure in a place that really needs it to make sure that people are getting the best healthcare they can.

That's exactly right.

Yeah.

And if you, I mean, there's a whole nother, much more scientific deep end to it as well in terms of how our brain is processing, like this 2D call right now. I'm not logging it spatially. Like this is, I'm looking at, I mean, I have screens in my office and stuff around me, but it's right here. If we were having this conversation in real life, my memory recall and my connection to it, whether I like it or not, would be significantly greater.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's much easier to put yourself in somebody's shoes or create that neural coupling, right? So when we're hearing about an experience, we're relating it to things that we've maybe not experienced, but somebody in our family has, or somebody we know has.

Totally.

Yeah. Really fascinating. So break down the process for bringing somebody in. You have consult, you have the concept, you have film and build and then deploy. When clients come to you, what does that first conversation actually sound like? And is there something— are they coming in with any preconceived wrong notions?

Almost always.

Okay.

And it's not their fault. Like, we're great. Anybody that's even remotely viewing immersive tech as something that's viable, them, I'm grateful for that. That's incredible. But 9 times out of 10, we get a call that says, I want to do this. Can you do that for me? Right. And then we have to step way back and again, do the cliché, like, what, what are you trying to actually accomplish here? And start to like really break that down. And in our industry, one of the biggest issues has been distribution. Right? Thinking all the way back to the, the, the physical 8,000 square foot warehouse that we had. Even fast forward to today, how we've broken through is we control all the distribution beginning to end. Like our clients aren't building experiences with the hope that someone's gonna download it on their device they have at home. Right? Unlike if you put out a YouTube video today, you know that millions and millions of people have access to it. If you do this with immersive, that's definitely not the case. So we try to focus on what are the touchpoints with those stakeholders, right? Do you have, do you have a meeting with some really high-stake individuals and 10 of them are gonna be in the, in the room together? And instead of doing a PowerPoint presentation, we're gonna put a headset on each one of those individuals to tell the story. Or are there 10 trade shows over the next 12 or 24 months that you're gonna be at and Who are the people that are going to be there and what are the key things that you struggle to tell them when they're in that environment? So again, cliché stuff, but I don't think people— people view VR as this, like, it's put in like a new tech box, but at the end of the day, we're just trying to do the same thing we've done for decades, which is tell stories. And we happen to be using this tool as the conduit for it. And so we just kind of have to work through that process and then ultimately come out with something, something on the other side. And sometimes, you know, we find that like, oh, if you want like mass distribution, like this isn't for, for you. But if you have like a baked-in audience or a captive audience, this is a phenomenal tool, but we might need to tweak some things around the edges in terms of what, what story you want to, you want you wanna tell.

Yeah.

It is that difference between going into a virtual room on your computer or say a Snapchat lens or filter, right? That's mass market versus the really intentional work that you're doing to specific audiences.

Yeah. And it's not, it's not high volume, right? I mean, like we just were in Taipei about a month ago where we did an activation with Rotary International. They have an annual meeting. We've been at 3 of them now. They're huge advocates and fundraisers for polio eradication around the world, but a lot of them haven't been to the front lines to, to see where their funding is going. And so they have anywhere between 20,000 and 30,000 people get together once a year. And so we go and we go for 5 days, 30 headsets, and we lay on the floor at the end of the night because we're having— it's so much work, but it's so energizing. Being there, because we usually have kind of a line for 9 hours a day for 5 days. We put 15, but even that said, we put 1,500 people through over that, that few day period, which is, you know, less than 10% of the total conference goers. But for us, for VR, that's a massive milestone. Like that's a huge number for anybody in our industry. And as long as you're going into it Okay. With that being the reach for an event, our job is done. But if you're trying to reach 50,000 in one day, this tool isn't, isn't for you.

Yeah. And, um, I'm just, I'm looking at the artwork behind you that says technology is not neutral, is what I believe it fully says. And I think of net neutrality. And I also think about the fact that you're able to use technology to inform people. And help them come to a decision, right? So is there any other meaning that you attribute to the artwork? For those of you who are watching the video, for those of you who are not watching the video, go to YouTube.

Yeah, this piece was actually surprisingly, I don't get asked about it very often, but I made that probably like 4 years ago. It was actually the first, the first time you could do text-to-image, I think with ChatGPT in the early days. I can't remember what it was. And the first prompt I put in, I think I have the prompt written on it. It was created, prompted for an abstract visualization of the implicit and explicit human bias woven into artificial intelligence and algorithms.

Wow.

And then it was actually hung at a, at a, a famous hotel in Minneapolis for like a, they they, you know, curate art for a 6-month period and then swap it out. So they, they had it up there, but this is probably 2023 maybe is my guess, like that. So, and then I actually had a filter on it too. So you would hold your phone up to it and, uh, the letters would pop out and do some cool stuff.

Oh.

But yeah, it's just kind of a, a, a reminder of all of these things, right? That we have to be conscious cuz there's, there's implicit and explicit bias baked into everything that we do. Even my work, right? Like I wake up every day and say, I'm gonna go do good, but I have bias whether I acknowledge it explicitly or not. So just a reminder of it all. And also like, it's really easy to be negative on all of this stuff, but you have to have an optimistic lens because it's moving and we need more people focused on how can we leverage these tools for good. And history would tell you that We always do good and bad with these things, and you just gotta make sure you're on the right side of it.

100%. So speaking of doing good and trying to make sure that you are meeting the goals of each of your clients, how do you set those metrics? Because I imagine every, you know, some of it is exposure and eyeballs, some of it is helping people make decisions. So is that, case by case?

Yeah, it's, it's, we can never do a true A and B test because of someone who's changing policy or funding. There's multiple touchpoints and we're one of them, right? So at our simplest level, I know, and it energizes me to have, like, for instance, with those Rotarians, there were 1,500 people that didn't want to leave our booth. They just wanted to talk about the trip that they had 15 years ago or 25 years ago, and this like brought them back and re-energized them, or someone who didn't even know polio was a thing, and now they really want to engage in discussion and want to know how they can help. And so we have all this anecdotal evidence. The second, again, more anecdotal, is we keep getting asked to come back to events. Like once we are part of an event, we're just kind of written in. For the next year. Otherwise people are like, hey, where's the, where's the VR? I want to do some more VR this year. And again, mind you, our average user is a non-tech person between the ages of 40 and 65. Right? This is not, these aren't like kids. And then we try to, we try to do some more formal work in terms of anonymous surveys. And there's on our website, actually at the top, we just published our 2026 VR Impact Report that was from that Taipei. Experience. And so like asking people to quantify best they can how present they felt during the experience. In this case, we ask people to compare it to other forms of media that they've digested. And, you know, the results are fairly overwhelmingly high, right? I mean, like 90% plus, you know, are gonna, are gonna say like this medium delivered the message with more impact than prior ways I was told about the Polio story. And so again, it's, it's tough with any sort of sales or marketing or storytelling. It's tough to directly quantify these things, but I would just say like our track record and our ability to— people missing us when we're not there is a good marker. And then just my own personal eyes and ears of being present at these events and how it shifts the discussion. But that's, that's always something we're, we're trying to get better about quantifying, as is the rest of the industry.

Yeah, I'm sure. So for somebody who's listening who doesn't have a huge budget but sees this as something really valuable, maybe they want to start building experiential into their business model. Where's a place that they should start? Like what's the smallest version of this that they would be able to test?

Yeah, so I always say that even when we get those first calls that say like, hey, I, I just had somebody call the other day and said, we wanna build a educational experience around Mars and we wanna do this and this. And my first question was like, what have you done so far? Right. And they're like, well, I haven't really, I tried this one thing a couple years ago and I'm like, okay. Before we even have a conversation, you know, I'll borrow you a headset, but I can think of just by Googling Mars VR experiences, you can find 20 public things. Now, 19 of 'em might not be very well done, but that, those are all microlearning experiences about like what makes good immersive and what, what doesn't. And so if you do have a budget, the Meta Quest headsets, which you could get off Amazon for, I can't remember what the latest one is, the 3S, but I call it $400. You could get delivered to your home and there's a lot of free experiences on there. There's immersive videos and YouTube that I would say the, the hardest part of that platform is that there's not enough good curation of experiences for people. So like we would get to know each other a little bit. Oh, you're into sports or your, your, uh, climate change is really important to you, or you like fishing or what, whatever it may be, then I could match you with high quality experiences in that subvertical. And so that's often the tricky part. As soon as somebody finds that one killer thing for them, they fall in love with it and it's obvious. But if you're met with things that are, you know, the top 10 aren't your, your thing. You'll be like, meh, okay, I tried it, but like, it wasn't that, that great. And so that's a little part of me dies inside when people are like, oh, you should have tried this. You would've loved this. So that, that there's a little bit of barrier there, some costs obviously, but there's a lot of amazing things you can use it for. Otherwise you could go into the store. There's free demos a lot of times, like Best Buy does free demos for the Meta Quest. And then the other one is the Apple Store. So if you go into almost every app, I think every Apple Store, You can probably walk in and get a demo or sign up online to get a free, like, 30-minute, really well-done, nicely curated demo of their device. And that's free of charge, no strings attached. They just love showing off the device and doing it in a curated way like Apple does. And more people should take advantage of that. Worst case scenario, you got to see a overpriced, slightly heavy Apple headset. And I think maybe they're showing like parts of a Metallica concert and a couple other cool things. So, um, but I would, I would highly, highly recommend it.

Yeah. Okay. That's really interesting. Now I'm wondering if there was ever a thesis that you had with your client on what you're going to get out of it, what, what people who are experiencing this are going to get out of it. And it turned out that they got, uh, the audience got something vastly different? Or has there been a time when perhaps, you know, you've used the same tool, the same experience in different conferences or with different audiences and had vastly different reactions?

Yeah, I would say that, I mean, typically we're doing a lot of work upfront. To vet and tease these things out and doing a lot of testing with different groups. So I mean, it's typically call it like a 9-month process. And usually when the client wants to engage and thinks that they can do it in 3 months, it's not really the production that's taking the longest. It's the planning and the vetting of all those details upfront. But I would say that in the global health space, depending on you and your role goal, you're going to have different reactions to different things. But I'm trying to also draw a line that like, I don't think that's unique to global health, right? Like if you know a lot about, if you know nothing about polio, you're going to take away different things than if you know a little bit about polio and you're going to take away something different than if you've been to a country with polio or worked on polio before. And then if you're a politician in a country with polio, you're also going to look at it differently. As well, right? And so it really depends on which seat you're in on that piece. But I would say the other really fascinating thing, and this goes back to kind of, this is good and bad, but we live at this intersection of all these worlds where, like for instance, the Cheese Company that was originally produced as a marketing tool, but they were like, we have a massive accounting department and HR department and a whole lot of other people in our company that haven't actually been to the farms, right? And so then it becomes an onboarding tool, a— it's now part of the, you get your handbook of read all of this. Oh, but then you also get to go and, and see how the cheese is actually made. 'Cause yeah, they, most people don't get to go tour factories and see the actual process. And so we found that in some cases, 100% or maybe 90 or 80 or 70% of that original experience can be used for an alternative use case because there's definitely other use cases within the companies. And I would say that that holds true for almost every, every business that I can think of. And I've seen a lot. So a lot of what you're doing with, with marketing and telling your story to customers, you're trying to, to tell that same story to new employees and training materials aren't getting more interesting. Unemployment rates, you know, are at a, it's tough to find people with skills. It's expensive to train people up and turnover is really high. So all of these things like, uh, you know, there's certain industries where people will job shadow for a year before they're able to actually do the job in some of these factories. That we've worked with in the past, and if we can create a VR experience that allows you to get more reps in and see more things and move that timeline from 12 months to 6 months, the ROI is crazy on that. And the math is just basic math.

Very cool. I appreciate that. So internal comms and external comms, different use cases. And I think that's probably a bonus for all of your clients as well because You know, they might come in with one goal, but then you're able to expand what they're thinking.

Yeah. And I wish, I wish, you know, for me, like my initial passion and still today is on the learning and development side of things. But I would say it's, it's probably true for most companies is there's less investment on that side and more on the outward facing. And so if we can kind of tap into both, it, it helps.

Definitely. So obviously a lot has changed since you started the company. What do you see as the next version of Rem5 Studios or the next thing that you want to start exploring?

I think that we're, so if we, if we think about immersive technology, there's different generations of it, and there's always the generation before and the generation before. And you know, we're standing on the shoulders of the, the generation before. And, and a lot of the ideas and a lot of the things we're talking about here today, while I have my fingerprint on a lot of them, there's probably somebody who was working on VR in the '70s that's rolling their eyes cuz they were talking about doing the exact same thing. They just didn't have the technology to actually execute. And that's, that's also kind of fun to think about and talk to people who have been thinking about it for a very long time. And so when I got into the space, that was right at the beginning of a new wave as Meta purchased Oculus for $2 billion, or Facebook at the time purchased them for $2 billion, 2 years before they had sold a single consumer product. And the thesis there was that, you know, Zuckerberg was looking at what the transition from PC to mobile did to their business and how he realized that he doesn't have total control of the data. And so needing to be thinking about what's the next ecosystem and how can we get into it early. And so when they made that acquisition, that kind of set off this next wave. And so as we kind of worked through that, it feels like in the last 24 months, that last wave is beginning to close and we're about to set off on a new wave as the intersection of AI and all these emerging technologies are starting to kind of come together as one. And it's a really exciting time. And so I think that it's bittersweet to kind of close the door on the last generation, but I'm, I'm really excited about the next generation. I think people's perception of what this technology can do is going to change. And we, we can only change it one person at a time. But I think there are some other companies in the space that can do it bigger than we're ever, ever able to. And a lot of the other people in our industry, in terms of— not in terms of like, I'm really proud of the work that we can do. And I think because we're small, we've been able to do some really interesting things that the bigger companies couldn't. But back to that perception of the technology, we can only do it one person at a time versus You know, the, the Facebooks and the Googles of the world have a little bit more, they have more resources than we do to be able to, to do that. And then I think you have this, this AI wave is, has been good and bad because it's very confusing as a consumer. You're like, Meta AI glasses, what are these? Why would I want these? Do they, are they taking video? Are they spying on me? What are my privacy concerns with it? What's going on? Going on there. Is that the same as what you're doing, Amir? Is that different? And it's like, well, like there's an easy answer and a hard answer to that, but I think all of these technologies are, are converging here over the next few years and it's gonna be really exciting.

Very cool. Well, you'll have to keep us posted as your journey continues. This has been really interesting because, you know, we're not just talking about virtual reality, we're talking about something even bigger, how we prove value of things that we know work when people who are writing the checks need a number, but they also need to really understand the impact. So you do have some Polio's Last Mile available on Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro, I believe. And we will, of course, share all of your links in the show notes, your Linktree, rem5studios.com. And the download links available as well. So thank you for taking us on this journey. I think there's so many implications for this technology in the future that we didn't even touch on, but I really appreciate how you and your, your company have leaned into impact work and the things that, you know, case studies that we probably wouldn't have even thought of that are making such an impact on what's happening in the rest of the world and how people are looking at those big issues that we might not see here in the United States.

Yeah. Well, thanks for taking the time and interest. Yeah, of course.

And I always ask, do you have a favorite quote, mantra, verse, poem, family motto, words that continue to inspire you?

I was just talking to one of my children about this the other day, just Be curious. Simple. And I think as adults, we just need to do that, do that more.

Yeah, absolutely. Amazing. This has been really fun. I think anybody who's listening, you know, people want experiences, especially with all of the AI that's taking over so many parts of our digital lives. Not being able to tell if a video that we're seeing on social media is AI or not. I'm seeing people really crave these experiences. So you may not be able to do this full experience right now, but, you know, take Amir's tips, go find out more about them, find out what you can learn, learn how you may be able to incorporate these in baby steps into your business and your brand and the impact that you're trying to make in the world. And with that, I'll be back again very soon with another amazing guest to share their story, their journey, and some things for you to think about for your business. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of Your Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.