Recently winning the XR Today award for ‘Best Manufacturing, Industrial & Construction Solution’ was a proud moment for all the Luminous XR team! Its great for all the hard work to be recognized and I’m delighted to have be part of the team delivering Industrial XR solutions to key global companies. Second to this is our continued growth in the oil & gas sector since the beginning of the year, as we continue to providing critical XR solutions that are positively impacting training delivery across the Middle East.

It may be a cliche, but one of my business heroes is Elon Musk. His visionary approach to business, ability to innovate across multiple industries, and relentless drive to achieve ambitious goals set him apart. Musk’s ventures have pushed the boundaries of technology and transformed sectors such as electric vehicles, space travel, and neuroscience. His willingness to tackle complex, high-risk challenges and his focus on sustainability and advancing human potential are particularly inspiring.

Shortly after finishing university I started a small photography business. This was before the days of digital cameras with internet and email being relatively new, I decide to promote my business with an ad-email to potential customers. I enthusiastically scanned several of my best photos to the highest resolution and attached them to an email. However, the scanned images were a huge size and having little understanding of resizing images at the time or what attaching large files would do, sent my email. Disastrously, the following day, I received a deluge of angry emails from my potential customers stating that my message had crashed their email and caused chaos, loosing any potential business! However, I bounced back and the business continued and I soon put the ad-mail behind me. I learnt that mistakes can and will happen, but bounce back and continue! Keep following your dream and learn from mistakes!

I read ‘The Alchemist’ by Paul Coelho several years ago and its lesson of following your dreams, never giving up and over coming obstacles on the way, resonated with me – and still does. I found its meaning very powerful and the pursuit of dreams inspiring: “The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”
More recently, I read ‘The History of the Future’ by Blake J.Harris – a longer read that provides a an insight into Palmer Luckey’s journey to create VR headsets and how his vision and determination brought about Oculus and the eventual acquisition by Facebook. I saw similarities to ‘The Alchemist’ and the twists and turns that you have to overcome in pursuit of your dreams.

I believe managing the delivery of our extensive range of solutions will be one my biggest challenges. The upsurge in interest in XR technologies (especially with the release of the Vision Pro earlier in the year) has driven positive attention from across a range of sectors in the region and managing the expectations of ambitious new clients entering the space will also be challenging.

I believe the continued growth in generative AI will gradually impact our business more and more in the short and long term. Integration into content creation could bring about dynamic development and building AI into training scenarios could aid information delivery through better contextual understanding and visual validation of user actions.