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Hello, and welcome to the reboot of The Weekly Weinersmith, celebrating the paperback release of our book Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything.

In Chapter 7 of Soonish we discuss Augmented Reality (AR). In AR systems, virtual elements are overlaid on the real world. Pokémon Go recently brought AR into the mainstream, and when most folks think about AR they typically imagine game or art-related uses for this tech.

But other folks are imagining how AR can be used to train and assist our workforce. AR can train workers under safe and life-like conditions, can go with workers on the job to help improve their accuracy, and can identify certain types of problems that may be hard for humans to see.

In this week’s episode, Kelly interviews Rosario Ballesteros-Casas, the Chief Executive Officer of VRAmericas. VRAmericas is working on AR and VR (virtual reality) applications to help train our workforce.

If you want to learn more about AR – check out Soonish. We discuss current technological hurdles AR needs to overcome, and the uncomfortable situations that can arise from the difficulty of controlling the virtual world. For example, what do you do when Squirtle is violating the sanctity of the dead?

Soonish is available now in hardback and as an audiobook on Audible, and comes out in paperback tomorrow (June 4) through Penguin Press in the US. Particular Books is releasing a paperback version of the book in the UK this coming October.