Flow Immersive CEO Jason Marsh says spatial data, AI-generated visualisations and display glasses can give business teams a better way to work with complex information – but enterprise XR still needs to prove value to real users in the first five minutes.
Business data still tends to live in flat formats: dashboards, spreadsheets, charts, slides and reports.
Jason Marsh thinks some of it belongs on the table.
The Flow Immersive CEO argues that spatial data can help teams build stronger mental models around complex information, especially when display glasses let that data sit inside a normal meeting rather than behind another screen.
Flow lets users place data into a shared 3D environment, where teams can point to information, change views, ask questions and work through the same visual model together.
Watch the full interview with Jason Marsh here.
Essentially, Flow is focused on the problem that humans naturally find data harder to understand and retain when it is flattened into 2D formats.
PowerPoint Makes People Work Too Hard
Marsh is direct about the format most businesses still use to explain complex information.
“PowerPoint violates the way the brain organizes information.”
His criticism is less about bad slide design than memory, i.e. a slide appears, disappears and gets replaced. The presenter knows the full argument, but the audience has to keep rebuilding the relationship between each idea as it goes.
Marsh said:
“The presenter has a good 3D model of all the information. They know all the slides that are coming and all the slides that were there, but you, as the first time experiencing it, you just get blasted with this kind of disappearing information.
“And it’s hard to remember, your brain gets tired. We’ve been to conferences where we just see PowerPoint deck after PowerPoint deck. And do you remember any of those slides? Almost none of them.”
Flow tries to keep the information in view. Instead of asking teams to remember how one slide connects to another, spatial data gives them a shared object they can look at, question and move around.
Marsh links this to spatial memory. He argues that 3D information activates the brain differently because people naturally use space to organise ideas.
He said having something 3D in the room “totally lights up” that part of the brain and “sticks in a very different way.”
Spatial Data Has to Be Practical
Spatial data cannot just look better. It has to make information easier to understand.
Marsh’s case for Flow rests on several effects working together: 3D structure, visual processing, interaction, animation and depth. A spatial environment lets users see relationships between points, click into details and follow how information changes between views.
Marsh explained:
“Because it’s 3D, it activates your brain in a different way. It activates your spatial brain. Because it’s visual, then you’re actually using the processing of your full visual cortex.”
Depth also changes how much information can be shown without overloading one flat surface. Designers often have to simplify a chart because the page or screen gets crowded. Spatial displays give users more room to separate information, focus at different depths and move around the data.
Marsh said:
“Because you can focus on different depths and you can turn and you can lean in and you can look around it, you solve a lot of that. And that also enables you to see better detail so that the data doesn’t lie like it always has to do when you oversimplify it.”
That is where Flow shines in the enterprise. A basic bar chart may still be better on a normal screen, but spatial data becomes more relevant when teams need to understand relationships, geography, risk, movement or hierarchy.
AI Changes Who Can Build Spatial Presentations.
Flow has been building spatial data experiences for years, but Marsh sees AI as a major shift in who can use the platform.
Before AI, creating a Flow presentation required more manual work. Users had to find data, process it, understand the editor and build the experience. That pushed the product toward larger organisations or specialist users.
Marsh said:
“To build these ‘flows’, as we call them, these data presentations, before AI, you had to deal with your data, you had to find data, you had to process your data, maybe you needed to be a data scientist, and then you needed to learn our beautiful but complex Flow editor.”
AI reduces that creation burden. Flow can now help find data, process it, write code, build a visual presentation and let the user edit the result.
Marsh said:
“The AI really changes who could use Flow instead of just the biggest enterprises. It’s basically anybody who has data that they care about.”
During the interview, Marsh showed examples including satellite data, financial data and a food-supply risk visualisation built from a news article. He said Flow can work with large datasets, although it does not always need thousands of data points to be valuable. In one example, around 100 data points were enough to show patterns across countries.
The product can also choose different visualisation types depending on the dataset, including geography, discrete points, relationship graphs and time-based data.
Display Glasses Fit the Meeting Room
Flow started with more VR work, but Marsh sees display glasses as a better fit for normal business meetings.
This is more practical than anything else; VR can work well for training and other immersive use cases, but a conference-room data discussion still depends on eye contact, body language and natural conversation.
Marsh said:
“There’s many places where [VR] works great. In training, there’s a lot of really good use cases for full VR, but if it’s an environment where the interaction with the other people in the room is so important, then a pair of glasses is really the way to go.”
Display glasses let Flow place data into the room without making the hardware dominate the meeting. The data can appear over the table while people remain visible to each other.
Marsh also expects tethered systems to play an important role, with processing and battery moved away from the face and into a phone or small compute unit. For Flow, the best device may not be the most immersive headset. It may be the device that lets spatial data fit into a normal meeting with the least friction.
The Business Case? Clarity
Flow’s strongest use cases are data-heavy conversations where teams need to explain complex information quickly.
Marsh pointed to financial services, wealth management, consulting, insurance and research. Flow has also worked with organisations including the UN General Assembly, the World Bank, large consultancies, financial services firms and insurance companies.
Consulting has been especially important.
Marsh said:
“Consulting is where we’ve had most of our business today, and we have been in business for 10 years.
“Consultants have a real need not only to understand their information, but then to share it. And they tend to share it in high-value meetings, which is also true in financial services.”
The common factor isn’t the sector. It’s whether the meeting depends on making complex information clearer. Flow is not selling XR as a category. It’s selling a different way to understand and explain data.
The Five-Minute Test
Marsh’s final point was aimed beyond Flow.
He wants the XR industry to stop depending on pilots that stay inside innovation teams and find users who can see value almost immediately.
Marsh said:
“I really want to challenge the industry to get out of POC mode and stop talking to the innovation teams in large corporations and just find the user that can gain value in the first five minutes.
“And if we can do that as an industry, that will give us all the success we’re hoping for.”
The buyer should not need a long explanation before the product makes sense. Flow’s argument is that spatial data can help teams understand complex information faster, remember it better and discuss it together.
The next challenge will be proving that quickly enough.
