Christopher Lafayette, founder of The Armada, discusses the mission of The Armada and how diversity strengthens the XR industry. The following is a transcript of our interview with him.

3E: Can you tell us your name and the company you’re here to represent?

CL: My name’s Christopher Lafayette, I am founder of The Armada, which is a platform that focuses on TTCS – technology, training, communications, and spaces – with a huge focus on emerging technologies, and helping people from lab-to-market, and lab-to-funding.

3E: What’s the impetus behind The Armada?

CL: In Silicon Valley, you’ve got people that are coming here around the world, and so the idea is to have a place for them to be able to land and to build. A lot of people come to Silicon Valley under false pretenses on how to get funded, where to go, they don’t know where to go, they come out with a product – they just don’t know that they don’t know.

And so The Armada is a place where they can land on their feet, and then hopefully be able to move forward in direction that they’re looking to build into. At the say time, kind of keeping them honest with their technology, because not all tech that’s out their is good tech. There’s a lot of duplicitous tech. A lot of people aren’t reading their SWOT analyses. They know their strengths, but they don’t identify their weakness, and they certainly haven’t recognized their threats. And so one of the things that I look at is help refine the process of put what we call a “Pre-filter Incubator System” in there so that we can filter out who’s really ready, and who’s not. Who needs a little bit more time, and who’s really hot and ready to go as far as what their product to get funded and to build.

That’s one part of it. And the other part of it is working with underrepresented talent, in particular, because Silicon Valley has a huge demand for it. Doesn’t matter the gender, doesn’t matter person. We need to get everybody that we can, because, at the end of the day, we need to remember that we want to hire the people that we want to buy our products. And so that’s going to make for a greater experience overall, so we’re not going to regress – instead that we move forward and what we’re doing, and so to be able to put them in a nice flow so that we can better be able to usher in more culture into this emerging technology, because if we’re talking about extended reality, if we’re going to extend reality, we need to bring it with us.

3E: What trends in the XR industry are exciting to you and why?

CL: I love seeing the growth right now when it comes location-based entertainment. What we’re seeing with that is about $1.2 billion, some say even closer to $2 billion in growth for 2018. With an access by year 2022 at about $8 billion-plus vertical economy for immersive technology. So, that’s about a 566% gain. So, I like seeing that.

I think people are starting to kind of kick the tires and kind of look and say, “Okay, what is virtual reality, what is augmented reality, what’s mixed reality?” Love what I’m seeing what’s coming through with Oculus, and their approach to stand-alones. I’m really excited for their future and what they’re doing when it comes to VR training. The big thing that we’re lacking, for the most part, a lot of people are still stuck in that VR is just another gaming platform. That couldn’t be anywhere further from the truth.

Just talking around the country and just around the world is that look at the marriage between immersive technology – XR, if you will – AI, and how those come together. Wearables, IOT – there’s a lot of technologies that are justified by other technologies. And so, start to think about what we’re looking at in terms of building today that’s going to be effective for tomorrow.

We talked more about the future of XR among other initiatives, and how it helps to accomplish the goal of making XR as a whole practical, approachable, and inviting to newcomers.