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Back in 2014, after Google Glass was released, the tech journalist and entrepreneur Tom Emrich wore that notoriously before-its-time AR device for nearly a year, trying to find ways to integrate it into his life. One day, a man who saw him sporting the wearable at a Tim Hortons in Toronto called him "the man from the future."

Now, after a decade-long run in the mixed-reality field that involved selling a startup to Niantic and then leading AR product management there, Tom remains a man from the future—only that future, in which spatial computing transforms the way we experience the world around us, is now much, much closer.

What that strange new paradigm will look like is the subject of Tom's new book, titled The Next Dimension: How to Use Augmented Reality for Business Growth in the Era of Spatial Computing. In it, he talks about where the technology is today, where it's going, and how to prepare for it.

So how will spatial computing open new doors for artistic creation, for the art market, and for the art experience writ large? And, more to the point, how can the famously slow-moving art ecosystem position itself so it is ready for the arrival of sophisticated, mass-adopted wearables within the next half decade?