XR Episodes

Today’s guest is Max Van Leeuwen, he is a digital creator known for his innovative work in augmented reality and more specifically Lens Studio. We discuss Max's creative journey, the importance of storytelling in AR projects, and the technical challenges faced when developing for Spectacles. The conversation also explores hand tracking, the role of mobile devices in AR experiences, and how to get started with Lens Studio. Max shares insights on integrating AI into AR and emphasises the need for ...

Giorgio Ballestin is a Technical Product Manager and XR specialist at MARIN, the Netherlands’ maritime research institute, where he owns the XR development roadmap and helps shape long-term simulation and digital twin capabilities. In this episode, we unpack how MARIN’s ship handling simulators evolved from large CAVE and motion-platform bridge systems into hybrid setups that add VR for deck-level and off-bridge operations. Giorgio explains why VR adoption is slower than it looks on paper, inclu...

Thomas van Bouwel is an indie XR game developer known for Cubism, one of the most successful puzzle games on Quest. In this episode, he shares the three-year journey of building Laser Dance, a rhythm stealth game that turns your living room into a laser-filled obstacle course using mixed reality. Thomas explains how rapidly evolving SDKs, scene meshing, and body tracking changed the game’s design mid-development, why real room geometry creates both magic and technical chaos, and how extensive pl...

Bobak Tavangar, co-founder of Brilliant Labs, joins the show to unpack Halo, the lightweight open-source AR glasses built for AI-first computing. Unlike camera-heavy smart glasses designed for social media, Halo focuses on continuous low-power sensing, on-device AI inference, and full-day wearability—turning an AI agent into a true “second brain.” Bobak explains how Halo handles privacy by discarding raw media and storing only embeddings, why open source is critical for innovation, and how devel...

Preston Platt, CTO and founder of Rock Paper Reality, joins the show to share how his team pushes the limits of XR development by blending AI workflows with rapid prototyping. With more than 16 years of experience in 3D modelling, animation, and spatial computing, Preston has built AR and MR projects for mobile, smartglasses, and headsets like the Apple Vision Pro. In this conversation, he explains how his studio embraces AI to accelerate code and asset generation, the role of generalists in cre...

Roberto Coviello is an engineer at Meta Reality Labs, where he builds open-source showcases and samples to help push XR development forward. He’s also known for his YouTube Channel full of in-depth XR tutorials that played a key role in his career. In this conversation we look at: How he started his professional journey as a developer, turned content creator, and the path that led him to become a Software Engineer at Meta We look at several SDKs provided by Meta and what he thinks is ...

Sam Cole is the CEO and a co-founder of FitXR. He is a firm believer in the benefits of regular exercise for physical and mental health, and since the conception of VR, he turned his vision of delivering immersive fitness into a reality for hundreds of thousands of people who have rediscovered that movement can be fun thanks to FitXR. In this conversation We take a deep dive into FitXR and learn how the team keeps innovating He shares the lessons he learned as a founder when rapidly g...

Mo dedicated over 18 years to designing solutions that empower people and make a meaningful impact. This includes more than 8 years in immersive XR, spatial computing, and AI-powered products, leading in-house and remote teams across pioneering startups like ShapesXR, Gravity Sketch and FitXR, forward-thinking agencies and more recently as Senior product designer at Meta. We tap into his experience when hiring designers His take on the role of designers within bigger and smaller organ...

Don Carson started as an illustrator, but soon his work expanded beyond the sketchbook to focus on the design of physical and virtual spaces. He worked as a Senior Show Designer, as an Imagineer, he designed entire lands for the Disney Parks and he is now Sr. Art Director at Mighty Coconut, the team behind Walkabout Minigolf, one of the most popular and loved apps on the Meta Quest. In this conversation we look at: How the team has embraced the low-poly graphics to create worlds people love ...

Dmytro Kornilov is an innovation marketing futurist with 15+ years of experience in the industry. He is the founder of FFFACE.ME an award-winning innovation company, and LOOOK.AI an AR and AI Mirrors company. With practical experience in AR, MR, Digital Beauty and Fashion, AI and Phygital, Dmytro has led omnichannel innovation projects for global brands like Prada, Inditex, PUIG, Ralph Lauren, D&G, Valentino, Burberry, L'Oréal, Mugler, Meta, and many more Nathan C Bowser (they/them): is a pr...

Andrew Seleznov. Head of AR Production at Arcadia. Snap's internal creative studio for branded experiences working with the Biggest brands in the world and reshaping the way user interact and angage digitally and with the world around them. Some of the capabilities of Lens Studio you might not know about We look at 2 of their biggest collaboration with Nike and NYX and break down the types of brands working with Arcadia and the secret to a successful collaboration Dive into ...

Christoph is an XR veteran, he worked as an XR developer at Axel Springer, and is now one of the minds behind Laser Limbo, a successful mixed reality game on Quest that turned into a full AR arcade in Berlin. Over the past years he has worked on several projects and full games that merge physical and digital and push the boundaries of what the current generation of headsets is capable of.His recent research has been focused on the camera API leading to some of the craziest AND most polished prot...

Orlando Mathias is a truly hands-on designer traversing the full breadth of product innovation from Strategy through to the nitty gritty of design & prototyping. He has led product innovation projects with Meta, Samsung 's Design Studio, and worked alongside Google's team on their gestural technology. He has now funded THE BLEND a design firm championing a physical first approach helping organisations anticipate and design our blended future. In this conversation, we will discover: What is h...

Marcus Ernst is Project Manager at MACK One, one of the drivers behind the AUREA Award community and a member of the MACK Research Team. He has been instrumental in creating attractions that have been the first immersive experience for hundreds of thousands of visitors in Europa Park the second largest theme park in Europe! In this conversation, we take a deep dive into: The successes and failures along this journey What is the most important KPI when operating at this scale ...

Yin-Chien Yeap is an XR developer who believes in making accessible immersive experiences for everyone. As part of that mission, he and his team have decided to bring a popular genre to the WebXR: Fitness. In this conversation, we will discuss: How they managed to prevent motion sickness despite being an intense racing app How the web is more powerful than you think The implications of web-based content for the future of XR Subscribe to XR AI Spotlight weekly newsletter ...

Connell Gauld is the CTO and Co-Founder of Zapworks. Zapworks was funded in 2011 and is one of the world's leading XR Platforms and creative studios. Since then the team kept building and innovating launching: - An affordable headset unlocking untapped growth opportunities - An editor for both designers and developers to build AR experiences directly on the web - A technology deployed on millions of products leveraging their knowledge of computer vision Subscribe to XR AI Spotlight ...

Jeri Ellsworth is an inventor, product creator, chip designer, and system-level engineer. Her combined passion for gaming and invention has fueled the creation of many cutting-edge technologies, culminating in the creation of Tilt Five, the world’s first augmented reality gaming system. Today we will look at: What are the biggest outstanding challenges when designing AR glasses We dive into product design and learn some of the principles that shaped what Tilt 5 is today Real...

Jesse Schell is the CEO of Schell Games, a team of more than one hundred fifty people with an impressive success streak. Some of their greatest success include games like Among Us and the “Expect You To Die” Trilogy and today we will dive into: What was the driving design principle when creating immersive experiences that stick with users How Schell games got affected by the changes on the Meta Store How he sees AI impacting the way we design and play games Why we don’t ...

Olivier Plante has over 12 years of experience as an innovator, team lead, founder, and is now the CEO of Fleksy: a white-label keyboard powering the best typing experiences in the world. I jumped into this conversation curious and unsure of what to expect, but Olivier opened a world to me and made me realize how important and reach a challenge like typing is in 2D, in 3D in the era of AI. We discussed: Why voice will never fully replace typing How the typing experience is evolving th...

Subscribe to XR AI Spotlight weekly newsletter 👉 https://xraispotlight.substack.com/ Avi Bar-Zeev has been at the forefront of Spatial Computing for over 30 years. He co-invented the Hololens AR headset in 2010, helped define Amazon Echo Frames in 2015, and he is going to share some of his thoughts and experience from leading the Experience Prototyping team for Apple's Vision Pro from 2016 to 2019 (Snippet 1). We discuss about: - The mistakes he has seen companies like Apple, Microsoft and...

Matt is the Sr. community programs manager at Mozilla: the non-profit behind Firefox that empowers people to shape a healthier digital world. He has built from scratch several online communities for users and developers and in this conversation he shares with us the complete handbook to get started and grow a healthy community around a common mission. We talk about: Resources to define the strategy and ROI metrics for your community effort Load of practical tips around discovery, a...

Diego di Tommaso is the co-founder of OVER, an ambitious startup seeking to merge the physical and virtual world through Augmented Reality (AR). And while this vision sounds very ambitious and something we have heard before, we will discover how OVER along with the help of an army of mappers has created the biggest 3D map of the world and made it possible to deploy AR experiences like never before. We will learn: What is the positioning system capable of supporting the future of spatial c...

David Marak has been active in XR since the early days of Google Cardboard and the first prototypes of augmented reality. Six years ago, he co-founded the immersive studio Yord, which has since expanded worldwide and is now recognized as one of the top Immersive App development companies globally. During this journey, Yord survived and thrived through a lot of ups and downs and he is now facing a new challenge and opportunity: the intersection between XR and AI. Today we will look at Yord cl...

Jonathan Hale is the CEO and CTO of the Wonderland Engine, a hyper-optimized 3D engine for 3D, VR, and AR on the web. If you've played any of the WebXR apps suggested by the Meta Quest Browser, it most likely was built using Wonderland Engine. So today’s conversation is all about WebXR: What are the best options for developers to build webXR apps Real examples of how Wonderland editor makes the life of developers easy The future of web XR apps on wearable devices An i...