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May 27, 2025 • 17 mins

In this episode, AR for Enterprise Alliance executive director Mark Sage chats with Mark Knowles-Lee, CEO of Fracture Reality. Fracture Reality develops JoinXR, a collaboration platform for AR headsets used in manufacturing, engineering, and a variety of enterprise applications. Knowles-Lee discusses the evolution of spatial collaboration and how it is redefining enterprise productivity. He describes emerging ways to empower enterprises with intuitive AR solutions that improve productivity. He also walks through the challenges of implementing enterprise AR today, such as security, training, and interoperability across OSs and devices, and says that he believes the barriers are coming down.

He concludes by offering advice to organizations starting on their enterprise AR journey. This is a must-listen for anyone interested in the practical, scalable future of enterprise XR.

Image from Fracture Reality's web page for the JoinXR spatial computing platform.

Please visit the AREA.

Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:09):
Hello everybody, it's Mark Sage,
Executive Eirector of the AR forEnterprise Alliance or better known as
the AREA. And we're herewith our latest podcast.
Mark, I know we've been workingtogether for a number of years,
but maybe just introduce yourself andtalk a little bit about your company.

(00:29):
Yeah, thanks, Mark. So yeah, hieveryone. My name's Mark Kn owles-Lee.
I'm the CEO of company calledFracture Reality. We make the JointXR,
which is our flagship software product.
It's a collaborationplatform for AR headsets.
My background originallywas in art direction,
technical art direction and consolegaming production pipelines,

(00:51):
pushing digital display fidelity.
Then in 2016 we set up F fracture realitywhen the HoloLens one launched because
we were so excited by the potentialfor mix and augment in reality.
And then that led us tobuild JoinXR in 2021.
So that's a brief intro hopefully.
Yes, thank you Mark. That's really great.

(01:12):
And we'll talk a little bit more aboutfracturing in the work you're doing in
the second,
but maybe the first question I can askyou is tell us a little bit about why you
joined the area and whatyou're hoping to achieve.
Well, collaboration reallyis at the core of what we do.
It's the core of our software thatwe've built and we really believe that
collaboration is the way todrive innovation and joining a

(01:35):
group like the area where there's ashared collective vision for how to drive
this interoperable ar adopt betweenacross enterprise seemed like the great
place to start. AREA'sis a great community.
We get to touch base with moversand shakers in this space.
Enterprise leaders, also our peers,and to some degree competitors.

(01:58):
It's a great place to havea hand in the development of
industry standards or to at least observewhat's going on, share best practices,
and collaborate generally on how wecan accelerate the adoption of this
technology.
Fantastic. Mark, that's really greatand appreciate those kind words,
but let's get back to whatyou're doing in fracture reality.

(02:20):
It's a great product,
been lucky enough to kind of useit and see it a number of times,
but tell us a little bit about yourkind of company's mission and vision.
What's that big helicopter viewof what you're trying to achieve?
I mean, but simply,
really our mission is to use joinXR to empower enterprises with

(02:41):
intuitive, scalable AR solutions.Really that can enhance productivity,
reduce costs, improve safety.
These are the benefitsfrom this technology.
And our vision really is aworld where our software,
well more generally AR is seamlesslyintegrated into daily workflows
primarily for manufacturingand engineering businesses.

(03:02):
That's where we've really had thesekind of light bulb moments and seen our
clients have epiphanies whereyou can absolutely solve problems
faster, cut down production times,
project times, spot problems faster.And when you see that happening,
it is so empowering that reallythat's to some degree help form

(03:25):
our mission and vision as we'vemoved forward as a company.
How we're trying to achieve that reallyis we've designed JointXR to be a
platform that makes mixedreality collaboration seamless,
makes it really accessible forenterprise teams. As I said,
focusing on manufacturing and engineeringand let people work quickly and
efficiently across multiple devices.

(03:49):
The use cases really, which underpin thatkind of mission is CAD design review,
technical presentations generally andremote training with experts in the loop.
These things are all waysof being far more efficient
in terms of engineering and industrialprocesses and that has all sorts
of benefits from cost savingsthrough to carbon reductions.

(04:14):
It's just really inspiring to beworking in this space at this time.
Yeah, thank you Mark. That's really great.
I've been lucky enough in a few differentevents when people will actually
experience your product,
you go through that eureka moment,don't you? They kind of go, wow,
so I can do this.

(04:34):
That's the kind of first step and thenyou get this flood of I could do this,
I and I could do this.
It's kind of almost like the use casescome thick and fast and I know you've
been quite good of saying, well,
let's focus on one because youneed to deliver some benefit.
But it is that kind of eureka, wow,
I could do all these things now let'sfocus and get something delivered.

(04:55):
Yeah, I think those initial,let's call 'em eureka moments,
they still come thick and fast andthey're still very kind of inspiring and
exciting, but I think you hitthe nail on the head there.
You need to then underpinthat with a sort of measured,
achievable approach rather thanjust living off the wow factor,
so to speak. Yeah.

(05:16):
Yeah. Cool. So we talkedabout the great bits,
but we all know there'squite a few challenges.
So can you talk a little bit about someof the challenges companies face when
trying to implement ar enterprise ai?
Yeah, I mean there arefor sure challenges.
I think the barrier toentry is coming down,

(05:37):
but that's down to multiplefactors, improvement in hardware,
some of the work you guys are doing,
people becoming a bitmore with the technology,
but big challenges are still, Ithink things like interoperability,
ensuring that AR solutions workacross a range of devices and
sometimes operating systems,

(05:59):
security data privacy is a massive issue.
It's something that we like to get onthe table very early on in a conversation
with anybody we're working with because
it's mission critical formost of our customers.
It's something we take very seriously,
but it can slow down theadoption of the technology,

(06:23):
which to some degree is plug and play,
but you've got to have that securitypiece answered to everyone's
satisfaction and that can sometimestake months and months. See,
we've got certification ISO 27001 to
sort of help with that,
but sometimes you've just got to gothe hard yards and I think depending on

(06:44):
who you're talking to in a new company,
they may be more focused just on theoutcome and you need to sort of wind them
back and say, yeah, you'll need to getyour InfoSec people involved. Early
user adoption as well.It's new technology still.
It's highly innovative,
but it takes time to train usersand look at that sort of change

(07:06):
management piece within an organization.
Quite often you can have aproduct evangelist who's an expert
at the software and the hardware,
but they've got to find a way to scalethat out efficiently within their
organization.
Integrating with existingsystems can be a challenge.

(07:27):
Even mobile device management is a littlebit more complex than we'd like it to
be. And I suppose the lastthing is, generally speaking,
what we are trying to do isvisualize our customer's CAD
in a highly efficient manner on a headsetand the complexity of engineering data
sets. It is such that thereare just challenges in display,

(07:50):
the amount of data that largeengineering firms need to do.
Sometimes that requires reallysitting down and working out efficient
pipelines.
Which is interesting because the nextquestion is about how are you helping
these companies? So can you maybe gointo a little bit more detail about that,
managing the pipelines andhaving that ability to work

(08:12):
together in these design reviews?
Can you talk about how you are helpingcompanies solve those problems?
Yes. I mean, I'm trying to thinkof a sort of short pithy answer,
but I don't think there is one.
Joint XR as a softwareplatform is pretty streamlined.
We've taken a plug and play approach,

(08:33):
so wherever possible customerscan self-serve their own data
without needing lotsof intermediate steps.
We've recently extended theplatform to ingest pretty much
every major CAD formatwithout any preparation.
We have sort of intelligentoptimization running on the outputs

(08:55):
so that it's already streamlinedand ready for use in the headset.
The display capabilities of ourplatform are pretty powerful.
So really all of that stuff takes awaythe day-to-day pain of trying to get
a huge CAD data set into an AR headset.
We've really made that avery streamlined process.

(09:19):
The UX of our software is highlyaccessible. That's come from,
it's a reasonably mature product now.We've done a lot of user testing,
we've had a lot offeedback from customers,
so the accessibility ofthe software is good for
security. I've already mentionedwe've got ISO 27001 certification

(09:40):
to sort of
accelerate ourselves through thekind of InfoSec side of things
as far as we can, but at some point,
the only other way we help companiesis through experience of having been
through multiple kindof security clearances.
Now we are pretty able tonavigate that and speed that up

(10:02):
in terms of training and support.I mentioned change management.
There's always a bit of friction gettingnew tech into a company to some degree
outside of streamlining oursoftware and that side of things.
It's just we've got a lot of experiencereally working with very large
organizations, global companies,down to smaller manufacturing firms,

(10:25):
and really that wealth of experienceI think just helps with training,
support and setup side of things. Yeah,
I think that...
Yeah, that's great, Mark.Yeah, no, thank you very much.
And I think I've got a question aroundthe insights that your company actually
brings. I think you'vementioned some of those things.

(10:46):
Maybe just focus a little bit on thatactual collaboration and how it changes
now by doing it in SR What kind of
differences are companies having?
How is your company enablinga new way of working?
Well, I mean

(11:07):
to some degree what everyone wantsto understand is what's the return on
investment, right? If we startworking in this new manner,
how are we saving time or money?
And really then that's thejustification for going through all of
the things we just discussed.
What we're seeing is companiesnot needing to travel so much.

(11:31):
They don't necessarily need to movepeople to locations or move equipment
to people. So they're reducing travelexpenses, they're reducing shipment costs.
Often they're reducing thenumber of prototypes being made.
So we've got a customer who was producinghundreds of physical prototypes every
year.
They've now moved to an entirely digitalsign off process where they can look at

(11:54):
a, we would call it a digital twin,
but probably it's more like a digitalproxy of the finished product in AR
with their customers.
They're no longer spending a lot of timeand money building physical prototypes,
a lot less wastage.That kind of
approach also allows productionrisks to be really managed far

(12:18):
fewer design amendments,
spotting problems beforethey get made physical.
We've got countless examples ofcustomers successfully doing this.
And again, from companies,
extremely large companies downto much smaller companies,
they're all saying the same thing,
that they're able to shorten theirproject timelines by significant amounts.

(12:41):
Six to eight weeks is a number wehear on a regular basis from our
customers simply because they haven't had,
they've communicated things faster,they've spotted problems earlier,
they haven't had to go to such greatlengths to explain information outside of
individual silos, and that's improvingteam collaboration across the board.

(13:02):
It's also helping them acceleratetraining for their new employees.
Obviously we've talked aboutthe kind of cost savings,
but even beginning to sort of reportperhaps that they're getting talent
retention because these new ways ofworking are just so much better that
people are more engagedwithin the organization.

(13:22):
Yeah, that's some great insights and Ireally love about the kind of ROI piece.
As you well know,
I'm a big fan of understanding that andI think you've articulated that really
well. So thank you, Mark. Let'sjust come to our last question then.
So apart from obviously joining the area,
what advice can you offer companieswho are starting on their enterprise AR
journey?
Apart from joining the AREA,

(13:43):
well obviously joining theAREA and get some join XR
licenses. No, really,
I think the key thing is,
and I know this is something that youguys have our home actually in your
workshops, mark, but it's I thinkcarefully identify your initial pilot.

(14:04):
We've seen companies,
and it's great when a company comes tous and they want to start big, actually,
we would recommend start small,
focus on somethingspecific and measurable.
Find a use case where you can pilot thattechnology but actually really measure
some kind of improvement.
Definitely don't try and implementa solution across your whole

(14:27):
business at once. It'smuch better to start small.
And also I would say we've seenreal successful companies where the
internal product champion hasbeen really carefully chosen.
They've been given thetime and the freedom to
explore things the way they want,

(14:47):
and that early successfulpilot can be pretty
critical to establishinga sort of beachhead of
trust internally within a companyfrom which things can then scale out.
I would also say prioritizing thatkind of training and support piece.

(15:08):
It's not just about getting someheadsets and getting some software.
You need a dedicated trainer in the loop.This is something we often help with,
but sometimes the internal product owner
within an enterprise runswith the ball on their own,
but regular check-ins ensuringthat the rest of the team in the

(15:30):
first stage of that pilot arecomfortable, confident using the tech,
don't sort of run beforeyou can walk, I guess,
and making sure that youcan measure the impact.
We've seen improvements in efficiency,productivity and cost savings.
It generally takes thecompany a few months
to get set up.

(15:50):
So we would say from whatwe've seen three to six months
to sort of identify andscope out the pilot.
And then within a year we wouldsee customers beginning to see
those efficiencies, productivitygains, cost savings,
and that's where they startto scale up a little bit more.
So being aware of starting small,

(16:12):
making sure you've got the righttraining and support in place and enough
time to measure that impact, I thinkare the key things. I would say.
There's a whole lot of other stuff aboutchoosing which hardware to go with,
et cetera, but that's sucha moving kind of piece.
The headset market is still quite frothy.

(16:33):
There's new devices coming all the time.
I don't see that as so missioncritical at this stage.
Agreed. Mark, thank you so much.
Some amazing kind of insightsand from a pioneer in
getting this technology out to customers,
so really appreciate your time todayand thank you for support the area and
continue looking forward tocontinuing working with you.

(16:56):
Not at all, Mark, always greatto chat with you and yeah,
see you soon hopefully!
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