This week our guest is Deniz Özgür, co-founder, co-CEO, Spacerunners. Space Runners is a fashion-tech platform that operates at the intersection of digital fashion, blockchain technology, and the metaverse. Deniz was named a Forbes 30 under 30 CEO last year. Spacerunners uses AI to help brands bring their products to new markets, like the Metaverse. Rony is off for the Jewish holiday Sukkot. Slow news week, unless you're Perplexity AI search, doubling your valuation with another $500 M raise. Mi...
Oct 28, 2024•44 min
This week our guest is Joaquin Cuenca Abela, co-founder and CEO of Freepik. Rony is off for the Jewish holiday, Sukkot. Earlier in the week, he launched his new company SynthBee with $20 million dollars of VC money. Also in the news, Nvidia enters software with a high-performing open source AI model, competing with its biggest customers. Our sponsor Zappar now has got a deep-pocketed backer with an exit strategy, Infinite Reality. Freepik CEO Joaquin Cuenca Abela joins us to share the story of h...
Oct 19, 2024•48 min
This week the hosts are here in full force to welcome Justin Maier, co-founder and CEO of Civitai. Elon Musk of Tesla revealed of the Robotaxi and its accompanying Robobus and Optimus robots. The nobel prize in Physics went to John Hopfield and Geoff Hinton, the AI Scientist who "retired from Google" warning the NY Times about the dangers of AGI. RIP Spacetop computer with its wearable AR monitor. Edward Berger’s immersive short film Submerged is now available on Apple’s Vision Pro. Justin Maier...
Oct 12, 2024•48 min
Ted and Charlie welcome Antony Batt, Neville Spiteri, co-founders of Wevr, creators of "The Blu," one of the first experiences created for the HTC Vive in 2016. Rony is off for the holiday (Happy New Year to those who celebrate). In the news, Future Trash, an LA creative studio, scores $5M to make experiences for Fortnite. Runware AI Raises $3M for super fast AI image generation. Infinite Realty buys Super League. Antony and Neville give a VR history lesson as they are also genuine VR OGs, havin...
Oct 05, 2024•50 min
Charlie, Rony and Ted welcome Yonatan Tal, CEO of Supersocial. First up is the flurry of announcements from Meta Connect, including the unveiling of their see-through AR headset, dubbed Orion, and more broad updates about AI. Rony shares intimate details of his conversation with Mark Zuckerberg at the prestigious Allen & Company invitation-only in Sun Valley. Yonatan Tal shares details of his Metaverse construction studio, Supersocial, and how they make Roblox experiences. The company is a c...
Oct 04, 2024•47 min
Ted and Charlie are Rony-less but happily dive into a busy newsweek, which featured new headsets from Snap and HTC, a $230 M raise for World Labs, which is focused on generating 3D AI, for worlds and assets. Also in the news Palmer Lucky to the rescue, and a Neuralink breakthrough. John Attanassio and Luisa Huang, co-founders of Toonstar, join us to share their nine year journey to success as an AI-assisted animation company, specializing in YouTube and social media. Their series, Stephen and Pa...
Sep 22, 2024•50 min
This week all three hosts are back in force with a great guest, Zhen Feng, Head of International for Roblox. Rony and Ted talk about a new hush-hush optics technology for XR which they believe is coming to headsets soon. It's a slow news week, but we did talk about iOs 18, Apple Intelligence (or lack thereof), and Google Shopping's virtual try-on. Zhen Fengs shares her unique journey from Microsoft to early Facebook, where she spent 13 years, and now her role at Roblox, which made us all want to...
Sep 20, 2024•49 min
This week it's Ted's turn to be too busy, but Charlie and Rony are in fine form, welcoming Liam Broza, CTO of Infinite Reality. In the news, funding for AI startups big and small, including Magic AI, Story Protocol, Miris, and Gen-AI animation app, Viggle. Liam explains how Infinite Reality is turning the browser into a metaverse streaming platform. Thank you to our sponsor, Zappar! Don't forget to like, share, and follow for more! Follow us on all socials @ThisWeekInXR! https://linktr.ee/thiswe...
Sep 08, 2024•48 min
This week we're joined by Ryan Chapman, CEO of Motive, focused on business applications of VR. We start with the state of the entertainment business, where Charlie throws around wildly inaccurate numbers to make the point that the music has stopped for the television networks and cable channels like MTV, which are about to be chopped up and sold for parts as they continue to hemorrhage viewers to Roblox, Fortnite, and TikTok. New AR glasses are coming from Meta and Snap next month. Oh, and there...
Aug 23, 2024•56 min
This week the three hosts are here in full force as Rony returns from vacation. Now that a federal judge ruled that Google is a monopolist, the question is what to do about it. Forbidding them from buying distribution is one thing, but now people are talking about forcing them to spin off their browser business. Speaking of Google, they've released new AI image generators, and they are quite good and totally free. Grok-2 is now available for X premium subscribers. It can also generate images. St...
Aug 17, 2024•47 min
Google's guilty of monopoly practices, but the result will be unclear for some time. Elon Musk continues to go bonkers while raking in trillions, nonetheless, he is suing people who don't like him, like former advertisers and others unhappy with the lack of moderation on their platform. Meta shuttered Echo Arena , and now they're shuttering the studio that makes it, Ready at Dawn, which they acquired in 2020. Our guest is Val Vacante, VP of Solutions Innovation for Dentsu Advertising. She is bas...
Aug 09, 2024•34 min
This week our guest is Kerestell Smith, creator of Gorilla Tag VR and founder of Another Axiom. Rony is on a farm with no Internet. In the news Canva surprises no one with its acquisition of Gen-AI startup Leonardo.ai. Congrats to Hedra AI text-to-voice, which produces lip-synced short video; they raised $10M. Meta reported earnings Weds. Revenue is up a whopping 22%. Our guest Kerestell Smith shares his extraordinary journey, from being an early VR fan and Echo Arena champion to developing Gori...
Aug 04, 2024•52 min
This week our guest is neuroscientist Dr. Cody Rall. Rony's working his super-secret day job (an AI startup). Top of the news is OpenAI's Search GPT, which is now a close beta (you can sign up); AI start-up Cohere valued at $5.5 B in their latest round. There are more than 20 AI unicorns - startups valued at more than $1B. Elon Musk has a supercomputer cluster in Memphis, and no idea (yet) where the power is coming from. Meta is in the news (constantly). This week their biggie is the release of ...
Jul 26, 2024•46 min
Charlie and Rony go Tedless this week with Sarah Nagy, founder and CEO of Seek AI, which brings AI to datasets that can be queried with natural language processing and other AI applications. This week's news includes funding for 3D company Jigspace, whose demos are bundled with Apple Vision Pro and tablets. Artificial Agency raised $16M for AI NPCs, and Haiper AI introduces eight second text-to-video gen-AI. Sarah Nagy is a "quant" and data scientist who founded Seek to help companies extract ma...
Jul 19, 2024•47 min
Another big news week finds AMD snapping up Silo AI for $655M. Captions lip dub co raises $60M. Odyssey AI out of stealth with hi-res gen-AI. Infinite Reality Raises $350M, Acquires LandVault in stock deal. Apple is launching the Iphone 16 with AI this fall, but Siri won't be out until Spring 2025. Samsung includes Bixby in its new launch. Our guest is Chandra Devam, CEO of Arismd, a ten year old company that created technology for X-Ray vision. Thank you to our sponsor, Zappar! Don't forget to ...
Jul 12, 2024•48 min
This week the news was all about AI, music labels sue AI music generators Suno and Udio. Etched raises $120M to make AI Chips. Emergence AI scores $97.2M to make AI agents for white-collar work. We share our hot takes on Augmented World Expo, which wrapped last week. Tony, a true XR OG and an old friend, joined Rony in the AWE Hall of Fame last week. We're talking about art, music, copyrights, problems in Hollywood, and the responsibilities (or lack thereof) of American companies. Thank you to o...
Jun 28, 2024•59 min
This 200th episode of "This Week in XR" is recorded with a live audience on AWE's Expo Stage on June 20, 2024. This is the 15th edition of the largest XR conference and expo in the world. We invited five guests who have never been on our show, AWE Program director Sonya Haskins, developer and blogger, Tony Vitillo, Cosmo Scharf, founder of VRLA, and Jenni Ogden, founder of Eye-Q Productions, which specializes in volumetric capture. We shared TWIXR's 2020 origin story, our views of the 15th show,...
Jun 23, 2024•55 min
This week is show #199. Our guest is Jeri Ellsworth, CEO and Co-Founder of Tilt Five. Next week we'll record show #200 in front of a live audience at AWE in Long Beach, CA. This week we review Apple AI (Apple Intelligence), their cross-platform AI implementation. Also in the news, Mistral raises $600 M to compete with OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic. Sandbox metaverse raises $20M, and achieves unicorn status while unicorn VR Chat lays off 30% of its staff. Jeri Ellsworth is co-founder of the...
Jun 14, 2024•56 min
Ted and Charlie welcome Ori Inbar, who is celebrating AWE's 15th anniversary by moving the June 18 - 20 show from Silicon Valley to Long Beach. In the news, big raises for Pika Labs ($80M) and Twelve Labs ($50M) that can understand video. Wevr, maker of the seminal VR experience The Blu, raises $3.5M. The CEO of Sony Pictures says he is "all in" on cinematic AI. Amidst layoffs in Microsoft mixed reality, Micrososft admits the fate of the HoloLens is in the hands of the US Army. With Ori, we disc...
Jun 11, 2024•46 min
Our guest is XR consultant and thought leader, Amy Peck, CEO of EndeavorXR, but first, it's Ted's birthday, and yes, we sing (sorry). After a brief celebration, we talked about Elon's monumental $6B raise for xAI, and Google's new partnership with Magic Leap, renewing a love affair that began in 2014, when Google made a whopping $500M bet on the nascent company. As Amy joins us, Rony gives us an insider look at Magic Leap's early days. Amy's focus on enterprise applications of XR, wearables and ...
May 31, 2024•46 min
This week our guest is Jon Vlassopulos, CEO of Napster, which is now a streaming platform with 170 M + tracks. In the news Scarjo v. OpenAI, data-tagging Scale AI snared another Billion dollar round, Series F, at a 13B valuation. Suno, the text-to-music generator, raised $125 M. A dying man is trying to clone himself in AI. Jon brings a wealth of experience in the music business, where he started as a DJ turned-Bertelsmann. Thank you to our sponsor, Zappar! Don't forget to like, share, and follo...
May 24, 2024•51 min
This week Ted and Charlie celebrate episode 195 without Rony. Our guest is Matthew Celia, of Lightsail VR, who produced Eli Roth's "Faceless Lady," which is now on Meta Quest TV for those with VR headsets. It's the first stereoscopic piece of it's six-episode series. In the news, Google IO drops its Sora competitor, Veo, and using Google Maps to "paint the world with data." Open AI has made a big step in humanizing chatbots, giving them expressive voices, and reducing latency, creating an experi...
May 17, 2024•43 min
Charlie and Rony give the show a go without Ted, who's traveling. Very busy news week with lots of M&A activity. We talked about CoStar Group's $1.6B acquisition of 3D scanner Matterport, Lamini AI's $25M raise for secure Enterprise AI, Neurable also raised money, Gen AI company Freepik acquired hit AI upscaler Magninfic, which is also a Spanish company. There was also news about Roblox (not good), Sandbox LBVR (very good), and behind-the-scenes with Sora director Paul Trillo, on how he crea...
May 10, 2024•53 min
This week the hosts discuss the new lawsuits against OpenAI. After six months of hype, sentiment about the Humane AI Pin, and The Apple Vision Pro, has become increasingly negative. This week, the press went after the darling of CES 2024, the Rabbit R1, with reviews that called it "unreviewable." This week our guests are Jennifer Tuft and Cassandra Rosenthal, Co-CEOs and founders of Kaleidoco, whose critically acclaimed 3D AR show, Particle Ink, is now in residence at the Luxor in Las Vegas. Tha...
May 03, 2024•48 min
We rescheduled Friday morning's recording for Monday night in order to bring you one of our most impressive guests ever, Yat Siu, Chairman of Animoca Brands, which has investments in Sandbox, Cool Cats, Yuga Labs, nearly two hundred other Metaverse, web3 and blockchain based companies. We do hit the news briefly before bringing in our guest. This week Perplexity AI search engine raised $63M, Meta made their Android-based spatial OS open-source, and sales concerns for the Apple Vision Pro. Thank ...
Apr 30, 2024•55 min
The hosts are all over Meta's release of the new MetaAI with Llama 3, now integrated across all of Meta's brands, and totally free, bringing an exceptional multimodal (does images with short animation) to nearly 4 B users. That's half the planet. Adobe is upgrading its Premiere editing suite, adding Sora for B roll, in-painting (for removing or adding images from shots), and shot extension, which adds frames to the beginning and end of shots. No guest this week, so we filled the last fifteen min...
Apr 19, 2024•29 min
Another episode packed with AI news, in particular an investigative NY Times piece revealing the big tech companies were aware of the copyright issues around vacuuming up the Internet. We also talked about two AI-based startups, Udio, which raised $10M for AI created music, and Spines, which raised $6M for e-book publishing. Our guest is Connell Gauld, CTO of Zappar, which makes the Zap.Works webXR development platform, the $100 Zapbox MR headset, which turns your iPhone into a Vision Pro. Conne...
Apr 12, 2024•49 min
This Week the hosts are talking about OpenAI's Voice Engine, which can be trained on fifteen second recording, creating profound questions about privacy and security. The guest this week is Maureen Fan, co-founder and CEO of Baobab Studios, which for eight years has been creating original content for VR, the Metaverse, and traditional media. The company's co-founder and Chief Creative Officer is Eric Darnell, director of Dreamworks' Madagascar movies. Thank you to our sponsor, Zappar! Don't forg...
Apr 05, 2024•53 min
The hosts are joined by Liz Hyman, President and Chief Executive Officer of the XR Association (XRA), the trade association promoting the dynamic growth of the XR industry. First up in the news, Amazon doubles down on Anthropic AI as it adds $2.75B to its previous $1.25B investment. OpenAI's text-to-video generator Sora goes to Hollywood, but what will - or can - it really create? Databricks creates a competitive LLM for just $10M. Liz Hyman joins us to talk about the immersive industry associat...
Mar 29, 2024•49 min
This Week in XR "Dear Tim" episode, an SXSW (South by Southwest) feature session was recorded live in Austin 3/12/24, featuring guest Joanna Popper, former CAA, NBC and HP executive. With the launch of the Meta Quest 3 in November, and the Apple Vision Pro in early February, we now have two competing approaches on spatial computing. The comparison to the iOS - Android mobile duopoly should be lost on no one. Many questions about the future of spatial computing are now up for discussion. What are...
Mar 28, 2024•1 hr 2 min
