Episodes

A single Cascadeur post on X triggered an uproar on social media. From excitement to hatred, the community of professionals and creatives voiced their feelings, asked legitimate questions and tried to understand how AI is reshaping the work of animators. To answer these questions, I talked with Alexander Grishanin, CTO of Cascadeur, who explains how Cascadeur defines AI versus machine learning, what is the state of the art when it comes to “procedural motion”, the ethical implications around tra...

Asim Ahmed, multi-award-winning game developer and head of product marketing at Niantic Spatial, joins the show to break down how geospatial AI is reshaping both digital experiences and real world infrastructure. As one of the early marketing leaders behind Pokémon GO and a key force behind the Peridot franchise across mobile, mixed reality and AR glasses, Asim explains how Niantic Spatial is building a large geospatial model that gives machines a true understanding of the physical world. Listen...

In this episode we talk with Thomas Flynn, a digital heritage specialist with deep experience in 3D digitisation, open access, and online publishing. Thomas has worked with UNESCO, Europeana, Oxford University, Creative Commons, and served as cultural heritage lead at Sketchfab, where he helped launch the British Museum's first open 3D collection. In this conversation, he explains how museums and cultural organisations think about 3D capture, what Gaussian splatting can and cannot do for heritag...

Mila is a PhD student in Switzerland and a researcher of social VR culture, known for a multi-year survey series on metaverse identity, harassment, and now virtual economies. In this episode, we unpack what people actually do in worlds like VRChat, and why platform design shapes everything from avatar choices to spending habits. Mila explains the shift toward semi-humanoid avatars, why many male users present as feminine, and how researchers handle sensitive questions across English and Japanese...

Cayden Pierce, CEO of Mentra, joins the show to discuss how his team is building an operating system for the next generation of personal computing through #smartglasses. Drawing on experience from MIT, building #AI agents, and earlier work with Steve Mann, he explains why all day wearability is the true barrier to mass adoption and how Mentra approaches power, latency, and ergonomics differently. Cayden breaks down the distinct roles of display glasses and camera glasses, why accessibility use c...

Nuno Leiria, founder and CEO of Nilo and former performance lead for Unreal Engine 5 and Fortnite at Epic Games, breaks down how Nilo lets anyone build playable 3D worlds in the browser in minutes without complex #GameEngines. He explains the sketch to #3D pipeline, where #AI handles modelling, rigging, animation, and starter code, and why latency is the key design constraint. We dig into real-time co-creation, remixable templates, and “creative generation” that assembles complex scenes from pri...

Viren Tellis, co-founder and CEO of Uthana, joins the show to discuss how generative AI is reshaping motion creation for games, VFX, and interactive worlds. With over 15 years of experience leading product and operations teams at AppNexus and Hedado, Viren explains how Uthana’s technology can generate animation from text, video, or even in real time, giving creators instant, controllable motion without traditional mocap setups. He breaks down how developers use Uthana’s SDKs and APIs in Unreal, ...

Tejas Kulkarni, CEO of Common Sense Machines and PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and AI from MIT, explains how CSM turns images and sketches into game-engine ready 3D assets. He breaks down why CSM ranked highly on the 3D Arena human evaluation, what “good” means in 3D generation, and how geometry, texture, topology, and parts segmentation affect real workflows. We discuss modular pipelines, UV mapping, controllability, and integration with Blender, Maya, Unity, and Unreal. Tejas contrasts m...

Nikola Todorovic, filmmaker, VFX supervisor, and co-founder of Wonder Dynamics (now Autodesk’s Flow Studio), shares how AI is reshaping 3D animation and post-production. In this episode, he explains how Flow Studio simplifies motion capture and compositing through video-based mocap, motion prediction, and automatic generation of passes like lighting and camera tracking. Nikola discusses the shift from black-box AI tools to transparent, editable workflows, the importance of synthetic data, and th...

Will Eastcott, CEO of PlayCanvas and veteran of EA, Sony, and Activision with credits on GTA, Call of Duty, and Max Payne, explains how Gaussian splatting is moving from experiments to production. He breaks down SuperSplat, an open source editor for cropping, recoloring, and optimizing splats for the web, and details a streaming level of detail system that scales from phones to desktops. Will shares how the new SOG format, built on lossless WebP, can cut files by up to 95 % while preserving qual...

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...

Roy Rodenaheuser is a London-based Creative Technologist with over 12 years of experience at Yahoo, Unity, and Capgemini. In this episode he shares the story behind Canvastique3D, a project he launched in 2024 that blends physical creativity with real-time 3D visualization. Canvastique3D allows designers, artists, and even industries like textiles and furniture to project physical materials and artwork directly onto digital 3D models, opening new possibilities for rapid prototyping and product v...

Manuel, a TEDx speaker, former head of XR Design at IBM Canada and Currently Emerging tech Advocate at Unity, brings 15 years of experience across industries from aerospace to gaming and now teaches at institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. In this episode, he discusses how creativity is shifting in an era where AI lowers barriers to entry, allowing more diverse voices to contribute. Manuel shares insights from his cultural preservation project Protopica, created with filmmaker Will Selvi...

Philip is a VFX artist at RiseFX creating visual effects for Films and TV Shows. He is growing an incredible a youtube channel called Pixel Artistry covering the latest tools and workflows in the rapidly evolving world of 3D GenAI to share his learning with a growing community of over 8000 subscribers. His content is some of the best I have found when it comes to 3D GenAI. His videos are both clear and actionable and today I sit down with him to learn: How he deals with the current limitatio...

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...

Lennard Wolff, holds a Master in Cinematography and he is an expert in volumetric capture technology. He is Former Senior Technical Director at Synthesia and now the CEO of AdventuryXR a London based a startup revolutionising corporate learning through photorealistic immersive experiences. Georgii Vysotskii the co-founder and CEO of Gracia.ai a deep tech company specializing in the visualization and distribution of Gaussian splatting even in VR. Subscribe to XR AI Spotlight weekly newslet...

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 ...

Kent Keirsey is the founder and CEO of Invoke. He has been in the tech industry for over 14 years, serving as a product and business leader in startups across B2B, B2C, and Enterprise SaaS. In 2022, he was an early contributor to Invoke's generative AI tools in open-source, building solutions for professional creatives. Recognising the need for these tools to serve teams, he founded Invoke in 2023 to provide image-generation software for established creative teams and enterprises. During this co...