IMAGINING TOMORROW: BUSINESS FUTURES | 56 OCTOBER 1, 2023 In addition to visiting historical sites in the present, VirTur also offers recreations and imagined alternative realities. Says Koizumi, “When you’re touring Machu Picchu, you can toggle between the site as it is now and how it would have looked when constructed. If you want to, you can watch a 15th-century Inca human sacrifice.” It’s the twin impact of what he calls “the imagination economy”: “First, you can do the same things cheaper, faster and eco-friendlier. Second, you can do creative, new things.” Koizumi runs VirTur entirely through XR, using a platform his company developed and is now marketing to other enterprises. As we conduct this interview, I am in my kitchen in Dublin, Ireland, while Koizumi, he tells me, is at his beach house in Okinawa, Japan. But we both appear to be in VirTur’s impressive boardroom, high in a skyscraper with sweeping views over downtown Tokyo. In fact, the boardroom itself is entirely virtual; VirTur no longer has a physical headquarters. “The world is finally starting to transcend physical constraints,” Koizumi says. “As late as the 2010s, people thought there would never be an adequate substitute for face-to-face. They couldn’t imagine how immersive XR would become. People said long-distance phone calls were the ‘death of distance’; then they said the same about video calls. But, with XR, it’s finally true.” THE WORLD OF REDESIGNING THTHEE I IMAMAGIGINANATIONTION THE AGE OF “TECHNO-POLITICS” LIFE E ECONOMYCONOMY (IN)SECURITY