When you think about augmented reality, you're taking your environment, for instance a beautiful setting, and you're layering digital content on top of it. It's a way to enhance what is already a beautiful world, rather than entering this new 3D world that someone else has created.

For me, the key opportunity of augmented reality is a way to tell your story in quite a personal way to your end users. You're sort of entering the audience’s environment. It could be their living room, their desk, the pub or bar where they are. So it's quite an intimate connection that you form with them, and that's a really great way to start telling your story.

Eight to 10 years ago, augmented reality was delivered primarily through a mobile app that end users had to download to their phone. In around 2016/2017, more and more experienced people from other industries such as 3D, animation and storytelling started to look at AR more seriously and the first cohort of really specialised, immersive agencies came about.

One of the things about augmented reality is that it's an amazing way to tell your brand story, because people are actually experiencing it in their surroundings, in their real life, there’s active engagement with that brand story.

We had a long-standing partnership with a company called 7-Eleven, who were really focused on their loyalty app and had this 7 rewards programme. In order to make the loyalty app even more compelling for users, they embedded an augmented reality SDK within it. Over the course of three or four years, the 7-Eleven team produced maybe 12 or 15 different game experiences around their store.

In a lot of companies your employees are your biggest assets. We find that the emotional connection you have when it's in front of you and in your space is a lot more powerful than just watching videos or reading documents. A lot of businesses are embracing augmented reality as a way of imparting important information to their staff and doing it in a super-engaging way.

Volumetric capture is quite an interesting new medium. Green-screen capture has been around for a long time. One of the biggest barriers to volumetric capture is that it is incredibly expensive. You have these huge spaces that have to be fully padded with green all round, and you have eight, maybe even more, very expensive cameras pointing at the model.

What you're trying to do is represent real life. As I'm sitting here, I'm moving my arms and gesticulating as I tell a story. As humans, we don't experience the world stuck in one place, hence you need to have that animation element in order to make it feel true to life.

Establish what you want and do come with an idea of what you're trying to do, but hold it loosely and let the creative team explore other avenues for you and let them pitch that back to you because they might come up with something that's a lot more interesting than what you you first came to them with.

Augmented reality is inherently playful and immersive, that's sort of built into the fabric of the content. Therefore, if you're trying to sell something really serious, you don't want your CEO coming up in a green screen, letting his staff know that 12 000 people are being made redundant this day. That's an inappropriate way to deliver that message.