From Prints to Immersive: How Niche AI Reimagines Volume Photography for Schools, Events, and Theme Parks

What if the best photo you take is just the start? The Dead Pixels Society sits down with Heath Lassiter, founder of Niche AI, to explore how volume imaging is transforming from prints and proofs into living, brand‑ready media—think fusion assets mapped to body parts, refined face replacement, and motion‑from‑stills that parents and guests can’t wait to share. Lassiter's roots at Express Digital and deep work across schools, theme parks, events, and cruises give him a rare, pragmatic lens on what actually scales: fast inference, lower COGS, consistent brand aesthetics, and real privacy compliance.

Lassiter unpacks Niche AI’s core offerings—precision cutouts, fusion scenes, and immersive face swaps—built to operate at enterprise speed and quality. The conversation gets tactical on GPU throughput, cost curves, and why off‑the‑shelf AI often produces generic looks or drifts from target demographics. Heath explains how his team blends proprietary models with in‑house design to nail placement, mood, and age‑appropriate results, and how that approach translates into higher conversions and repeat purchases across e‑commerce.

Schools get a spotlight: extend fall capture slightly and replace the operationally heavy spring shoot with AI-driven products—seasonal themes, cap‑and‑gown automation (colors, tassels, even hands and diplomas when needed), and short motion clips for social. We cover data handling, GDPR, API vs on‑prem, and why once‑reluctant enterprises are now opening the door to responsible generative and non‑generative workflows. For parks and events, the image becomes both souvenir and marketing engine, turning guest photos into shareable media that drives reach and revenue.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Heath’s Origin Story & Mentors
• 3:35 Defining “Volume” Across Verticals
• 6:40 From Prints to Shareable Media
• 8:58 Introducing Niche AI’s Platform
• 13:25 Surviving the AI Hype Cycle
• 16:10 Fusion, Immersive, and Motion Explained
• 22:08 Cost, Scale, and GPU Throughput
• 26:20 Sports, Fashion, and Age-Gender Models
• 31:45 School Strategy: One Fall Shoot, More Products

Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:01

Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society Podcast, the photoimaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau. The Dead Pixels Society Podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers.

Gary Pageau: 0:17

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society Podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by Heath Lassiter, who's the founder of Niche AI, and it's in the volume imaging business. But we all know Heath from like 17 different companies he's been through over the years. Hi Heath, how are you today?

Heath Lassiter: 0:35

I'm doing good, Gary. How are you today?

Gary Pageau: 0:38

Doing great, doing great. Always good to see you and catch up with you. You seem to you've been a presence in the industry for, like I said, quite possibly a thousand years. Where did you get started in this business?

Heath Lassiter: 0:51

Yeah, so and thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. Um, I began my journey basically in the photo industry, I would say about 23 years ago, uh, with a company called Express Digital. Uh, that company provided a leading ecosystem for professional photographers, uh, labs, and e-commerce platforms. And so my experience there, particularly working with CEO Graham McFarlane and CTO, his brother, Kevin McFarlane, they truly offered invaluable insights into the industry, which ignited my passion for photography. But really, throughout my career, I've been you know fortunate enough to have exceptional mentors, notably, you know, Robert St. Marie, whom you know very well with 36 picks. Yeah. Just a genuinely you know, smart and inspiring individual. Uh, and my friend Russ Steiger, who is a highly intelligent CTO who specialized in software for theme parks and workflows in the past. And so that's where I get my deep appreciation for the industry.

Gary Pageau: 1:45

And so you were with Express Digital for a long time. What then when we moved on from there, what did you do?

Heath Lassiter: 1:51

Yeah, from there basically I started uh consulting. So I worked as a consultant in the industry, partnering with various companies to boost revenue, uh, develop new products, and create strategic visions for the most part.

Gary Pageau: 2:02

Cool. So, you know, technology business development has sort of been your thing, and you've kind of focused a lot in the volume space, it seems like. And can you kind of define what volume means in your context? With the, you know, because it could mean a lot of things to different people, right?

Heath Lassiter: 2:18

Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, I've engaged in various complex workflows over the years, delivering software software solutions, that is, across diverse verticals. So I feel truly privileged, you know, to work alongside of some of the innovative minds that I've worked with. But as far as the high volume uh is concerned, you know, I I've been working in the high volume space, not only on the school side, but on the theme park side, event side, crew side. And it just actually fits the niche uh that that I've been uh no pun intended, of course, that I've been working on and trying to come up with newer technologies to help people not only advance generative and non-generative AI, and we will get into that in a second, but really to give them something unique and different, to be honest with you.

Gary Pageau: 3:00

So the volume space has been really interesting because you know, back in the day, a lot of this stuff was captured analog, right? With film and different things, and then you had, you know, maybe in theme parks and things, you had maybe had video capture and video prints, which were terrible. And then as things gone have gone digital, uh, it's created all kinds of new opportunities for a lot of people, like especially especially like you said, in school photography and in the event space and cruise ships and things like that. What do you think customers in those segments are looking for? Are they really looking for capturing a memory or is it something else?

Heath Lassiter: 3:41

You know, I think it's one for capturing a memory, and two, it's something that can they can actually share on social media platforms. You know, the possibilities that AI offers for elevating those sectors, in my opinion, are immense. And I believe it's crucial for companies to adopt both generative and non-generative AI to really evolve and to avoid you know falling apart with stagnant content, in my opinion.

Gary Pageau: 4:05

Because I think it is a kind of changed the value proposition of especially like events and theme parks, where you know, the the the print that they would sell was the value, right? That was the transaction. They were looking to sell prints from your picture on a roller coaster, but now they want that picture shared, they want it sent out almost as a promotional application.

Heath Lassiter: 4:30

Yep. No, I completely agree with that 100%. So, you know, what I'd like to do is introduce my company, which is niche AI. And what we do is, and I'll get into that, we provide machine learning and AI inference models for enterprise businesses. And so, going back to your question, our platform is at production scale, uh, and it's built for throughput. So, from precision cutouts to branded fusion to what we call immersive scenes, even motion from stills, what we're doing right now, which is pretty amazing. And I'll get into that at Visual First a little bit more. You know, we don't just preserve accuracy, we add uh, you know, emotion into those stills, transforming static images into like livable sharing memories.

Gary Pageau: 5:12

So you talk a little bit about that, where you're taking something and adding something to it that may or may not have been in the original photo. That really kind of gets away from just the memory keeping aspect almost into the entertainment space.

Heath Lassiter: 5:27

Yeah, correct. You know, from what I've seen, Gary, you know, AI has changed the way, well, it provides for one, it uh it provides new opportunities, but it also provides new challenges. So AI has changed the way content is created. You know, the biggest thing that I'm starting to notice in working with AI is client and customer preferences evolve, and AI unleashes a lot of creativity than ever before. But the beautiful thing is opportunities are abound and companies can capitalize on that. You know, there was an MIT report, I think that it came out, I want to say probably about seven weeks ago, and it said 95% of AI startups actually fail within that first year. And we are in our first year. We just started this company up in January of 2025, and we feel very fortunate because for one, we are profitable and we are pumping through anywhere from about 24 to 25 million images and videos through our pipeline this year alone. So, you know, we have very experienced and dedicated, uh, extremely dedicated and talented team. And so I'm actually ramping up and developing new content for current and future clients.

Gary Pageau: 6:33

You know, when people talk about the failure rate in AI, right? It kind of reminds me of kind of like the original dot-com bubble, right? Where all this money was being poured into AI or into, you know, internet startups. And you know, if you were basically wanted to have a photo site in 1999 or 2000, you know, all this VC money would be chasing you, and then most of those imploded and just and things like kind of get that feeling today with AI, where if you just call yourself AI, someone's gonna drop about a bucket of cash on you, uh, with the hope that maybe one of those investments will pay off. How is yours different, right? Like you, I mean, you said yours is probable, you're making money. Um can you kind of describe why that was important for you to actually be a viable business as opposed to uh just another thing that with AI in the name?

Heath Lassiter: 7:23

Sure, yeah. Basically, leveraging AI can actually be long, expensive, and risky when I'm talking to my clients out there. So building in-house requires, for one, large investment, a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of resources to maintain. And so it changes rapidly, requiring constant rebuilds. You know, there's a lot of exactly what you said, Gary, off-the-shelf products out there that removes, in my opinion, distinct appearances. Uh, customers become generic, outputs basically can drift, deviating from desired age groups and brand line consistency. Um, you know, and creative teams have varying experience in leveraging AI, and that's where my team comes in, to where we can actually help leverage that AI. So, how big is your team?

Gary Pageau: 8:04

How what's what's what's the company like at this point?

Heath Lassiter: 8:07

So, right now we're about nine strong, and I'm actually building new content because I'm getting ready to onboard another customer. So I'm hiring a lot of engineers, uh, commute computer vision for the most part, uh, as of right now. And once I take this to the next level, I'm gonna be hiring, you know, abroad for for all verticals, or shall I say, all positions in the company that is.

Gary Pageau: 8:28

So when you talk about specifically the things your company offers for let's say a you know, a uh a volume photography application, you you know, on your website, you've got three things you mentioned. You know, you mentioned extraction, you mentioned fusion and headshot. Extraction's been around for a while, it's kind of like you know, table stakes for a lot of this thing. What do you mean by by fusion? What is the fusion offering from uh your company?

Heath Lassiter: 8:57

So we the only reason we have the extraction is because we built the extraction to build our other models. Our fusion model is basically an asset that is actually on a body part. So, you know, if we put a penguin on a shoulder or in a hand, or we do use a Harry Potter scene, for example, or a wizard scene that is, for example, and I put some type of um wand in your hand, that is considered a fusion type product because we're associating the asset with the actual body part itself. The immersive is going to be more of a face swapping technology, but it's more of our version two. So we're calling it the immersive experience. And what we're doing is we're basically putting people's heads into people actually with penguins and walking with penguins, and we're changing their moods and changing their expressions. In my opinion, when we started this back in January, some of it looked, and I hate to use the word creepy, but some of it didn't look like my kid per se, because I was using my daughter as an example, some of these photos. And I was like, oh my gosh, I would actually never buy that. However, we fine-tune that, and the models have changed tremendously. And I think we have a better understanding of where we're at with that, creating compelling personalized content using either our customers' branding or our assets. So we can quickly leverage new content and models, and we're deploying new models pretty quickly. And it's all about automating the manual processes that were done in the past because those were time consuming. You'd have to build the background and the foreground, and then you'd have to basically adjust it and crop it and so on and so forth. Ours is at volume and at scale, so we can basically deliver more content for the less cost.

Gary Pageau: 10:31

And that's really where I think people are hoping to monetize the uh AI experiences through you know increased workflow production and everything. When you talk about the cost side of it, I mean you're hitting servers and doing a lot of computation on all that kind of stuff. Is that getting faster? How is that going?

Heath Lassiter: 10:48

Yeah, it's getting faster. I mean, it depends on what processes that you guys that we're currently using out there. Uh we're using the NVIDIA processors that are currently out there. Sometimes our cogs, depending on how many servers we have spun up, our cogs could go up or down unless we're running those at 24-7. Um, but for the most part, we're trying to bring our cogs down. The more we can actually pump through our volume, the better we're gonna do as far as bringing costs down for our customers and for ourselves, as far as the cost of goods are concerned. So, really going back to our fusion technology, really it's about transforming guest photos and basically with our advanced fusion technology. And again, I keep saying this, but at enterprise level speeds and quality, that's what we're trying to get across.

Gary Pageau: 11:30

Now, for the the event market, that kind of is interesting. Like you said, you know, if you've got you know a you know, a wizarding environment and you want to have a you know integrate some some elements that you know are not visible, like you know, uh, you know, uh creatures or you know, wands, props, whatever. So you can basically take someone's face and put them into a scene in a movie, for example, and it would look pretty uh realistic. How can you take that idea and transform it into other segments of the volume industry?

Heath Lassiter: 12:04

You know, so I'm I'm looking at the sports industry specifically, the fashion industry, you know, hyper-personalized seam immersion product. So what we do is we blend subject with custom on-brand assets for the most part, uh, face extraction, which is done through our face swapping technology, which is now the immersion. We do have an age and gender identification model that we actually have to build in. So it says, okay, is this a child? Is this a teen? Is this a is this a kid? Is this an infant? Is this an adult? And then basically we have that service to where we actually have an upscaling service as well built into our technology because one of our customers is sending us such low res images and our output is such high quality that we had to specifically upscale that and we're actually pumping out what we're calling motion right now as well. So we're taking a still image and we can have their face actually moving. And I've got a scene that I'm gonna be showing at visual first with a tiger and how the tiger's yawning and how the kids looking at the tiger just from a still image alone. So, going back to your question though, you know, we're really targeting industries that can use that type of technology and going back to the event space. So we're trying to come up with something new, something creative, but we're also trying to bring that price down for people. And it does take away, you know, in my opinion, from some editing jobs, but at the same time, it's going to create new jobs because you're gonna have to, you know, do some quality control on the back end, but that gets those companies to focus in on different areas of their business of growth, and that's what we're trying to help companies do right now.

Gary Pageau: 13:35

Do you get much pushback from customers who think, you know, well, this is not really what the customer is experiencing in the park. You know, they weren't they weren't actually encountering a tiger, if you will. And right, you know, is there or are people's expectations changing that they want this sort of thing? I guess where I'm I'm getting getting back to is the idea that the the original photo and an event was a memento, right? It was capturing that memory or that image, and now it's evolving into an entertainment experience, right?

Heath Lassiter: 14:12

You know, I guess what I'm seeing really is I'm starting to see an adoption rate from the younger generation for one, uh, for both generative and non-generative AI. And I think it's rapidly, as you see across all social media platforms, you know, it's rapidly increasing, you know, due to massive changes we've seen in the past 12 months. So, in my opinion, it's essential for businesses to adapt and integrate AI responsibly, of course, to not only stay ahead of the curve, but to not get left behind because of how things are you know moving and and really evolving out there.

Gary Pageau: 14:41

You spun this up pretty quickly, right? You know, you've only been uh you start finding the company January. I know you've been working on it longer than that because we've talked for a while. But correct. But how much of this stuff, like you said, much was off the shelf, but how much of it is custom? How much of this is proprietary technology that you've developed?

Heath Lassiter: 15:00

Some of it when we started was off the shelf, but some of it's going to be proprietary moving forward. So we're using a little bit off the shelf, but we're basically we have our own in-house design team. So we're basically designing everything uh from our perspective. Uh, we do have uh companies that we're working with that like to use their branded assets, as I was saying a little bit earlier. Yep, absolutely. You know, and that's and that's perfectly fine, but we also have an in-house where I think our products look a little bit nicer, in my opinion, because we know exactly where to place exactly where to place everything for the most part. So, yeah, for the most part, it's uh it's it again, it's at volume and it's at scale for the most part.

Gary Pageau: 15:35

And you've got experience in the space, so you kind of know what the customers want.

Heath Lassiter: 15:39

No, absolutely. And we try to do that, but some companies they don't want to pay for the models because we do charge per model right now, but if we use their assets, we don't charge them as much. The thing is, is when we use their assets, you know, sometimes it goes back and forth, and then they need approval, and then they need approval for the assets, and then it has to come over to us, and then we have to build it versus hey, I can actually build this pretty quickly as long as you give me the assets. I could build this within three days and I could deploy it within seven days versus it going on for 14 or 21 days because of all the internal politics for the most part.

Gary Pageau: 16:11

Yeah, because I imagine when you're dealing with you know licensing and branding and all of these things, there's layers of legalities that you've got to deal with.

Heath Lassiter: 16:22

Absolutely, 100%. We always have to deal with that, you know. And and something I I didn't, I wasn't gonna bring this up at first, but you know, this really brings I wanted to talk about, you know, an approach that I've been working on specifically for the school industry. And and really it, I think this could possibly enhance product offerings and generate substantial cost savings. So my proposal really using the technology is optimizing fall photography sessions really to eliminate the need for spring shoots. And what I mean by that is leveraging the power of AI to create diverse and engaging products. So, you know, what if, and I've talked to a lot of school, high-volume school photographers out there. I asked them how long they typically spend with their kids, and they said, uh, we spend about 30 seconds per kid. And I was like, that's pretty quick. And they're like, well, we have to get them through the sessions. And I said, Well, what if? What if we just did 60 seconds instead of 30 seconds? It's a slight increase for allowing greater variety of poses, uh, expressions, resulting maybe in a richer collection of images per student. And in my opinion, the key benefit of this approach is the ability to capture enough high-quality photos in the fall, making spring photography sessions and scheduling unnecessary. And what I mean by that is, you know, with expanded library of fall photos, we can utilize both generative and non-generative AI models to create new and existing product lines. So traditional themes like Christmas, the cap and gown stuff that I showed you, which is basically getting ready to be piloted, by the way, and I'll talk about that later, you know, and offer fun and imaginative backgrounds with scenarios like Star Wars or whimsical images with penguins or, you know, lions, basically providing, you know, unique keepsakes for students and families. So what I'm thinking right now is by implementing implementing our technology or any other AI technology, you know, for fall-centric AI-powered strategy, I think companies out there might realize the significant bottom line savings by eliminating, I would say, substantial overhead associated with spring photography operations, including photographer fees, travel props, scheduling, logistics. I mean, that is a nightmare for some of these companies, and the turnover rate's so high that they have to train them every year. So, just in my opinion, this efficiency gain also creates an incredible opportunity to integrate any new products that are going to be into their e-commerce platform, hopefully leading to an increased ASP, which is an average sales price, and a more robust profit margin. So could you use?

Gary Pageau: 19:06

I'm just thinking trying to learn search on the capture side. Could you use even like you know, because I know you're saying, hey, you know, go from 30 seconds to 60 seconds, but that's double the time. And I think some people might give you pushback on that, but could you almost use like a video to capture and pull stills from that to get what you need within that 30 seconds? Because I know different people have played with that technology where you know, I know Panasonic's been pushing that for a while as hey, you know, just capture a video and you can get the 4K off the video, and it's great.

Heath Lassiter: 19:37

Yeah. Um, is that a possibility? That is definitely a possibility. Now we're not doing it right now, but in my opinion, with everything that we're doing, that is not far off, and I could easily do that. So I haven't thought about it that way, but absolutely that is something we could definitely deliver on.

Gary Pageau: 19:51

And and for those who aren't familiar with the difference between the fall shoot and the spring shoot, because you know, I mean, back when I was a kid, you just did the fall shoot, right? And now the spring shoot is a thing. What is the difference in the offering for the parents for the spring shoot versus a fall shoot?

Heath Lassiter: 20:08

You know, the fall shoot is their is is school photographers' main shoot. It's gonna be that traditional three-quarter pose, right? It's the it's the main traditional pose that parents actually want to see versus the spring is gonna be more whimsical, like I was talking about a little bit earlier. Something that's a little bit more playful, especially when I when I when I'm talking about this, this is not gonna be for your seniors, this is not gonna be for your high schools, it's mostly gonna be K through five or potentially K through eight. And and we believe that this potential strategic shift will not only save customers or, shall I say, photographers on operational costs, but also drive a new revenue streams. And I have specifically talked to a couple of companies that are potentially interested in piloting this with a couple of schools to see how it works out because it is a headache for them to basically have to retrain every single year. And that's one of their main uh pain points. And I'm trying to see if I can cover this.

Gary Pageau: 21:03

Yeah, and the and the other thing is is you know, it's it's I imagine the buy rate for spring shoots is lower than than the fall shoot.

Heath Lassiter: 21:13

Correct. And so if we can get creative, and again, whimsical, I hate to keep using the same word, using something a little bit different and using our motion technology to deliver it through their pipeline. So everybody wants to share things on TikTok and Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram and so on and so forth, right? And that's the opportunity to create something new and basically increase that package, whether it's only by five or ten dollars, it will increase it because that's what we're seeing with our current customers, by the way.

Gary Pageau: 21:40

And the other thing is, is it's kind of expanding that idea of you know re-monetizing that image from even the fall shoot. Because I know, like some school photographers are doing very well with hey, I'm just gonna remarket the fall shoot in November and tell mom that she needs to order a Christmas ornament for grandma and grandpa, right? And just doing that remarketing has people are seeing a lot of success. So if you can expand that in a digital idea to the spring, I think you're gonna get some uh good uptick on that.

Heath Lassiter: 22:12

You know, I'm hoping to. And you know, I'm not trying to take anything away from what you know, customers or shall I say, what companies have done in the past with school, but I'm trying to just do something maybe a little bit differently, not to necessarily revolutionize, but come up with something different and innovative. Because as you know, Gary, sometimes it's a little stagnant, it goes slow for a little bit while a little while, and then you've got new content that comes out and it opens people's minds to new ideas. Because last year, you know, when I was showing you my technology, I was talking to a very large company out there, and I just talked to them recently. And when I talked to them last year, they specifically said that they could not use an API call because they could not share their data both ways. And I was like, okay, that's interesting. So we need to come up with an on-premise type solution. And then they also stated that they could not use generative AI in their solutions. Well, I had a discussion with them uh about I'd say about a month and a half ago, and that has completely changed because AI is revolutionizing the way that people are dealing with photos and videos, and so they're open to that now, they're open to API calls. So we don't have to go in there and put an on-prem solution and monitor the hardware and take the capex hit and so on and so forth. We're basically doing things, and I just think generative AI, generative and non-generative AI is really opening the door for a lot of companies out there, including it.

Gary Pageau: 23:32

So, but but their first question was regarding the privacy aspect, right? Because about student images going back and forth. Do you think that's not going to be a concern, or are you able to comply with those security requirements?

Heath Lassiter: 23:44

I mean, we're going to be complying with those uh security, definitely 100%, you know, and that's that's important, right? You can't misuse you there's privacy implications, like you were saying. While AI can be misused, it also provides opportunities if you're doing it in the right way. So I think the adoption rate for both, in my opinion, both for generative and non-generative AI, I just think it's gonna completely change. And and basically people are gonna have to adopt or they're gonna get left behind, in my opinion.

Gary Pageau: 24:10

Well, I think one of the things obviously, you know, that you got to be very careful of is you know, appropriate use of a child's image, right? Because there are people who are, of course, very concerned about images being shared online of the children. And you know, there's always those stories, it seems like where you know, images were hacked or shared, and the moms were very free, you know, upset about the fact that Sally or Bobby's image may be on the dark web somewhere. So you've certainly got to make sure that that piece is taken care of, and I'm sure you've taken care of that.

Heath Lassiter: 24:41

100%, absolutely, and that's something that we have to deal with, you know, on the European side, we got to deal with GDPR as well. So, you know, those are things we have looked into, and that we we will continue to uh look into and comply with whatever needs we have are necessary for the most part.

Gary Pageau: 24:56

And that comes from your experience in the volume space, where I think, you know, sometimes you know, there's a lot of people looking at using AI to, you know, quote, revolutionize unquote photography, but they don't have the industry experience to understand what those concerns are, right? I mean, I've I've seen a few people trying to pop up who, you know, yeah, we can do all this stuff, but they don't have any experience in the volume industry, understanding the privacy concerns, the security concerns, you know, those kind of things, which are you know paramount to that business.

Heath Lassiter: 25:29

Yeah, a lot of those companies are just throwing things out there to see what sticks, versus my product actually has well, not only customers, but it has a very sticky um ecosystem for the most part. And once we've actually proven out our concept and increased the average sales for the companies that we're working with, and we do have statistics on that, that it's gonna take them, it's basically taking them to another level, and they can go out and get new customers and basically work with new products and basically drive innovation forward.

Gary Pageau: 25:58

Now, you mentioned earlier a graduation product. Did you want to talk specifically about that? That was something that was kind of unusual, I thought, with how you were kind of using that.

Heath Lassiter: 26:07

Yeah, so I mean, one of the examples was the images that I showed you. So we can take a traditional school image, right? Somebody looking straightforward or somebody turned a little bit. Um, and what we can do is we put a cap and gown on this person. So when you graduate kindergarten or fifth grade or eighth grade, instead of photographers actually taking the prop off somebody, putting it on somebody else, the time that it actually takes to do that, then they have to fix their hair and maybe put the hat on and change the tassel over where our software can actually automate that. And I've talked to a lot of photographers that say that takes them a lot of time, and that is a major pain point for them. So, what we do is we've actually through scale and through basically adjusting things, we we have done what we call a cap and gown. So we can change the color of the cap and gown, we can change the side of the tassel. We can basically, if the kid has no hands, we could do a generative where we're basically creating the hands from the skin tone of that kid and creating a diploma in his hand to create an entirely new product, for example. That would be a generative AI example, right? A non-generative AI example would be okay, we still take that kid, we put the capping down, but we don't create the hands and we just leave them down to the side. That's not creating anything generative, right? So that would be our non-generative product. So we could offer either or in that fashion. And so again, we're getting ready to do a proof of concept and a pilot with a couple companies out there for that specific model. Um, but for the school industry as a whole, I mean, it could be really whatever you think of. And I think more of, and you tell me what you think, Gary, but I think more of like your Halloween, your Christmas, your Easter, your spring, the fun stuff, and basically providing content and you know, our videos, which are basically MP4s for the most part, that they can share through the pipeline.

Gary Pageau: 27:55

Well, even then, you like you know, you can do like school mascot, like you said, you got sports pictures, you got things like that that you could do that's additional content that they're capturing that they could, you know, use generated value in some way to, you know, hooray for Team Spirit or School Spirit or whatnot. I mean, those are all additional applications because I know, especially in the school photography space, you know, a lot of photographers are obligated to take pictures for the yearbook at different events and do other things, and that might be an opportunity for this type of application.

Heath Lassiter: 28:26

Absolutely, 100%. So, no, I agree with that assessment. And again, I wasn't thinking about schools the whole time. I have gotten a little bit of pushback from the school industry, uh, but I've also had a lot of people open up and say, wow, these are some pretty good ideas. I think I think we need to pivot and change to something different. So, people wanting to see this demo in person.

Gary Pageau: 28:46

Perhaps if they were in San Francisco, where would they be and where would could they see you?

Heath Lassiter: 28:52

Absolutely. So uh October 28th and 29th, um, I will actually be at Visual First in San Francisco. Uh, our good friend Hans Hartman actually runs the uh the event. Uh, fantastic event, a lot of C-level executives in the photo and video industry. I've you know learned so much through not only attending these, but just having the basically the ability to attend these and and talk to a lot of high-level people out there that truly understand and love the photo industry as you and I do.

Gary Pageau: 29:24

And what are you gonna be showing? I mean, you're doing an actual on-stage demo, right?

Heath Lassiter: 29:28

So, you know, I was gonna do an on-stage demo, but what I decided to do is kind of flip it a little bit. A lot of people told me that this was a probably not a great idea, but instead I'm gonna go ahead and run with it. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do an introduction because it's about a four minute time frame that I've got to actually push through this. Right. I know the moderator of that, so I've got to be, you know, spot on.

Gary Pageau: 29:48

And he will be quite stringent on the time, trust me.

Heath Lassiter: 29:51

Oh, I know, I know. I if I'm one minute over, I'm dead in the water.

Gary Pageau: 29:55

One second over, you're over.

Heath Lassiter: 29:57

That's what I meant. But no, I'm gonna be highlighting our technical. Technology. I'm going to talk a little bit about who I am and uh what the company does. And then I'm going to jump into an explainer video because instead of me talking about my content, my content is completely visual. So I want everybody in the industry to see what I actually do from the video side, from what we do as far as our fusion product to our immersion product, and then where we're going to the next level. So I've created an explainer video that's going to highlight our technologies through that. And then afterwards, I'm actually working on a web app right now. And if I can get it finalized, and you will know this very well, as long as I have a good internet connection, right? Right. And have good cell phone service, I might kill it. But hopefully, I'm going to at the very end put a QR code, tell people to pull out their phones. They're going to scan the QR code. It's going to open up their camera, they're going to take a selfie of themselves, and then they can put themselves in our tiger immersion or a wizard on the fly. But again, I might kill that depending on the technology once I get there.

Gary Pageau: 31:03

So well, from what I understand, the brand new venue, which is public TV uh TV station, apparently the internet is very good there, from what I've been told.

Heath Lassiter: 31:11

So excellent.

Gary Pageau: 31:12

So hopefully the part of the infrastructure upgrade for the 2025 visual first is include hopefully reliable internet, which of course is the bane of every tech conference is getting reliable internet. So hopefully that'll happen for us.

Heath Lassiter: 31:27

But we could test it out, right? But there might not be the three to four hundred people there waiting as well that are on the internet.

Gary Pageau: 31:32

Exactly. Exactly. I sure would hate to say, hey, scan the QR code and it doesn't work just because of that. Well, hopefully it'll be a great demo. So you're going to be uh launching this more or less publicly at Visual First. Anything else you're going to be uh talking about at Visual First or looking forward to seeing while you're there?

Heath Lassiter: 31:50

Well, the coming out party actually starts today with you, Gary. So thank you for having me for one. So so this is this is me coming out with the company. Um, Visual First is when I'm going to be doing my first big big presentation. We are doing our website as well. So that will be launching here within the next two weeks. And yeah, I'm going to be showing all the current products that we currently have in our pipeline and talking to individuals that we can actually help and create new content for. Because again, I can create content fairly quickly from my perspective because of our in-house design teams. And I can pump out something specifically for e-commerce platforms or whatever people are actually needing out there. Because again, my technology isn't really geared only for the theme park cruise line school markets. It's it could be anything with photos, events that are out there, anything dealing with videos. We really want to disrupt this market with our technology.

Gary Pageau: 32:39

Awesome. Well, thank you, Heath, for taking time. And I hope people when the when the website does launch, people will be able to get there. And I look forward to seeing you in a very short time at Visual First.

Heath Lassiter: 32:50

Absolutely. Look forward to it. And uh yeah, I'll see you here soon, Gary. Thank you.

Erin Manning: 32:55

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