Episodes

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 human...

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 his i...

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 in any other platf...

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 start ...

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 for various ...

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 about a Blender add-on...

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 How scaling down was...

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...

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...

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 👉 https://xraispotlight.s...

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 His experience when de...

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 weekly newsle...

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 features that m...

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 swipe and even play gam...

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 examples of how Tilt...

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 have a Killer app for XR...

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...

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 thanks to AI ...

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 Amazo...

Subscribe to XR AI Spotlight weekly newsletter 👉 https://xraispotlight.substack.com/ Gordon is the co-founder of Anything World, a startup that wants to make everyone a 3D content creator using AI! One of the things that makes them different from many other startups trying desperately to crack the code is their focus on animations and the fact their technology is available for basically everything: blender, maya, Unreal, roblox and even Discord. But is AI good enough to support professional work...

Charlie Fink is a Producer, Podcaster, Author, Professor, and Forbes columnist, covering AI, XR, and the Metaverse. In this interview, we discuss: The current state of XR How AR might not be the perfect match for AI as we all might think Some of the similarities and differences between the rise of the internet and the rise of AI The impact AI is having on teachers and students How AI will take people’s jobs… even his own Subscribe to XR AI Spotlight weekly newsletter 👉 https://xraispotlight.subs...

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, activation and ...

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 computin...

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 client...