Episodes
74
July 15, 2025
Varjo Just Made Gaussian Splatting Enterprise-Ready
Knut Nesheim has a background in large-scale machine learning systems and big data. He leads the engineering teams building Teleport, the Gaussian splatting tool created by Varjo, the Finnish hardware company renowned for the top-tier MR headset used by the most demanding businesses and enterprises worldwide. In this conversation we take a deep dive at the intersection of Gaussian splatting and VR. We look at the very technological foundation of Teleport Unique features it offers to u...
71
July 8, 2025
How to Build Worlds (and Make Money) on Viverse
Andranik Aslanyan is Head of Growth for VIVERSE at HTC, where he leads business strategies across marketing social media and product development to grow and scale this world-building platform built on the web for the web. In this conversation, we look at: A unique feature offered to world builders to help them overcome the limitations of the web How can creators monetise their work on Viverse How Viverse has implemented Gaussian Splatting A precious advice he gives to wo...
75
July 2, 2025
What It’s Really Like to Build Vision Pro Apps Today
Matt Hoerl is a designer building things that feel inevitable once they exist. He founded Beautiful Things in 2024, a studio crafting AI native spatial experiences for the Apple Vision Pro. His visionOS apps have been globally featured by Apple Editors and selected as “Best in Education” and “Best in Design.” In this conversation we look at: His impressions about WWDC and what it unlocks for developers and users We went to the moon to experience Beautiful things Several ways in...
73
June 25, 2025
The Art of Designing Believable AI Agents
Yuqian Sun is a Chinese AI narrative researcher based in London and currently a doctoral student at the Royal College of Art. Leveraging her expertise in interactive media, she creates narrative experiences that feel alive and extend beyond video games and into our daily lives through conversational AI agents. She explores this topic through chatbots, games and interactive installations, which expand the boundary of fiction through human or non-human language interactions. In this conversa...
72
June 17, 2025
The Best (and Worst) of the Camera API on Quest
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...
68
June 11, 2025
3D Animation with AI and Beyond
Naureen Mahmood is the CEO & co-founder of Meshcapade, an award-winning tech startup based in the heart Europe’s largest AI ecosystem, Cyber Valley. At Meshcapade she is applying her work on human understanding for training AI avatars to see, understand and interact just like humans. This goes way beyond animating game characters. Meshcapade is developing the world's first and only 3D human behavior engine to power human-like interactions and behaviors for AI characters, virtual beings and hu...
70
June 4, 2025
Physical First: Rethinking UX for Spatial Computing
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...
67
May 28, 2025
Why Gaussian Splatting Changes Everything for the 3D Web
Lisa Maria Egger, Co-founder & COO at Arrival.Space, an award-winning immersive web-based platform developed by Stratum1 that empowers people to create, connect, share, and explore next-generation content wherever you want on VR headset, mobile or the browser. In this conversation, we will look at: The key feature that turns Gaussian Splatting into the next level web content How these spaces can be experienced on web, mobile, and in VR A storytelling feature I have never seen i...
69
May 21, 2025
Designing the Future of E-Commerce with XR and AI at Amazon
Xiaobi (Iris) Pan is a globally recognised pioneer in the field of Emerging Technology Design. She is the mind behind interactive installations that blend digital and physical, visited by millions of participants. Currently, Iris is a Lead Designer at Amazon. There, she is dedicated to using technologies such as Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence to revolutionise the consumer experience for both business and social good. (snippet 1) We covered a lot during this conversation. We ...
65
May 7, 2025
Why Pros Use ComfyUI and How to Get Started
Lovis Odin is a French interactive designer specialising in 3D, XR and motion. With the advent of AI he started digging into tools and workflows to accelerate and augment the work of creatives, and today he will share with us how comfy UI has become one of the primary weapons in his toolset. ComdyUI can feel quite intimidating but I ended the conversation knowing so much more and ready to dive in. We will talk about: How to get started with ComfyUI What are the hardware requirements f...
66
April 30, 2025
Tools, Workflows, and Optimizations for Gaussian Splatting
Olli Huttunen is an entrepreneur, video editor, 3D specialist, software developer and a real authority when it comes to Gaussian Splatting. I got to know Olli thanks to his Youtube channel, a priceless resource for anybody who wants to dive into this new 3D paradigm and today we take a deep dive into the world of Gaussian splatting: Olli explains why PostShot is his favorite tool and how to make the most out of it He shares best practices to minimize file sizes He tells us abou...
63
April 23, 2025
What Deploying XR for Millions Taught Us
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 ...
64
April 16, 2025
This App Turns Doomscrolling into Roomscrolling
Jason was a PM Director at Meta, GM at Vine, at Google he worked on Youtube and Gmail and all this experience in Big tech companies taught him a hard lesson on what to keep and what to get rid of when building products people love.He is now the founder & ceo of Things.inc, the company behind the award-winning app Rooms: a platform that has successfully replaced doom scrolling with Room scrolling and unlocked a new way to create in 3D and tell stories, all wrapped in an app recognized as best App...
62
April 9, 2025
The Future of 3D Generative AI with Meshy’s CEO Ethan Hu
Ethan Hu holds a PhD in computer graphics and AI from MIT, he is the CEO at Meshy a Silicon Valley based startup creating an AI-powered tool that generates textured 3D models from images or text, in under a minute. Meshy is the ONLY 3D AI tool featured in A16Z’s 2024 AI Tools Survey and only in 2024 Over 20 million 3D assets were generated thanks to Meshy. In this conversation, we will dive into the world of 3D Gen AI. We will discover:- How are professionals using 3D assets generated with AI- H...
61
April 2, 2025
HoverFit: The VR Fitness Game That Works in Your Browser
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 ...
60
March 26, 2025
AI Meets AR: Building the Future with Snap Spectacles
Ernest Spicer is a data scientist, game developer, and technology executive developing new immersive learning and gaming experiences in AR powered by AI, and I don’t say that lightly because Ernest and his team were the first to deploy AI on the new Snap Spectacles. In this conversation, we will dive into His experience when developing for various smart glasses How as a special Olympic coach he sees AR helping neurodivergent athletes We talk about the future of wearable AI ...
58
March 19, 2025
The XR Company That’s Powering Over 2 Billion Products
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 ...
59
March 12, 2025
How Kiri Solved Gaussian Splatting’s Biggest Limitation
Jack Wang is the CEO of Kiri engine a powerful 3D scanning app for Android, iOS (and web browsers!). I have experienced Kiri myself and trust me, there some key features that makes it different from anything else on the market. Today we will dive into the world of Gaussian splatting with Jack discussing: - Some of the current limitations of Gaussian splitting - The benefits of Gaussian Splatting compared to photogrammetry and the verticals benefitting from it - Some of the unique featur...
57
March 5, 2025
Wisear: Neural Interface that fits in your ears
Yacine Aciakh spent over six years as a Senior AI Product Manager at Criteo, one of France's first unicorns, where he grew multiple products to $100M in annual revenue. In 2019, he co-founded Wisear with one clear goal: connecting humans and computers like never before. In this conversation: We start by looking into the foundation of neural interfaces What were some of the challenges when building neural interfaces that fit in your earbuds He showed me how he could select sw...
56
Feb. 26, 2025
How Jeri Ellsworth Built Tilt Five AR Glasses
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...
55
Feb. 19, 2025
The Present and Future of XR Gaming with Jesse Schell
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 ...
54
Feb. 12, 2025
How to Build Co-Located MR Games for Quest
Steven founded Fantail Games to create Mixed Reality games that deepen our connection with the real world, the physical environment and our friends/family. He has worked on 40+ games with clients including Disney, Universal, EA and Hasbro working across many roles including coding, design, producing and even sales. He recently released Game Night a multiplayer mixedreality experience with no UI and where your body is the controller. Steven is a true believer in co located mixed reality and in th...
53
Feb. 5, 2025
How to Build a Better Typing Experience in XR Powered by AI
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...
52
Jan. 29, 2025
How to Design the Product and Experiences of the Future
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...