In this Episode the Thomas² talk with Gabriele Romagnoli about his lately published Mixed Reality Report. The XR Expert took a laborious challenge: Find and categorize XR Apps mainly at the Quest Store which are Mixed Reality. But what does that even mean? Gabriele decided to be rather rigorous with the categories instead of shotgunning all the categories on one app. We talk about the results of the report as well as what that means for the state of the industry.

About the report
The report analyzes 400+ mixed reality (MR) apps, primarily from the Meta Quest store, to understand ecosystem evolution and user preferences. It finds a near 50/50 split between gaming and non-gaming MR apps, though gaming titles receive more ratings and higher average ratings. While action, puzzle, and sports are popular gaming categories, fitness and productivity dominate the non-gaming space, with many non-gaming apps still considered tech demos. Gabriele suggests MR development has been slow due to technical challenges, a small user base, and the difficulty of creating compelling MR experiences. The report concludes with a look at AI-integrated apps and co-located experiences, and Gabriele plans to continue tracking the MR app landscape.

Find the report here:

Welcome to 2024 and welcome to the age of Spatial Computing! At least that is what Apple wants us to believe. And they push hard and swift to proof they want to make it happen. So much, that they just announced to release the Apple Vision Pro as early as February 2nd 2024! That is indeed „Early next year“.

But that is not enough: Within their developer website they ask developers not to use the words AR, VR or MR, but only to speak about Spatial Computing.

Time to investigate what Spatial Computing actually is. But there is a problem: The Wikipedia article is rather short. And not very helpful. Usually that’s what journalists or the so-called experts on LinkedIn would do: Read the Wikipedia article and hope they understand enough, what a word actually means. It was enough for Metaverse (it was not). But for Spatial Computing we really could need some historical help.

Thats why I am happy to have Avi Bar-Zeev as a guest in this episode. He claims to have used the word as early as 1992 at Worldesign Inc, which would be 10 years earlier than what the Wikipedia articles source Simon Greenwolds work „Spatial Computing“ from 2003 claims.

In „Spatial Computing“ Greenwolds uses this example to explain Spatial Computing: “The simplest example may be an auto-flushing toilet that senses the user’s movement away to trigger a flush. This is trivial spatial computing, but it qualifies. The space of the system’s engagement is a real human space.”

Avi doesn’t agree here. Although the toilet recognizes you leave the room, the computational aspect of the mechanism is not existent.

As the former team-lead prototyping the AppleVision Pro he explains what he understands Spatial Computing is:

„The general accepted definition of Spatial Computing is that humans are naturally spatial, we exist in a spatial environment, we interact in the world around us. There is the world within arm’s reach, and then there is the world we can see. But all of those things is what we call ego-centric, they are very much about us who are placed in the world. Spatial Computing is essentially trying to get the computer to understand that, that world, that we live in, so that we can interact with the computer. Because everything else up to now has been us trying to adapt to the computer’s world. […] Spatial Computing is adding a few new technologies in order to bring the intelligence of the computer into our world.“

Interview

In this Interview I am happy to welcome Gabriella (Gabs) Chihan-Stanley. She is co-founder and communications manager of XR Content Production Company Vrisch, which just has been nominated with a project at the VR Awards and already won a lot of them in the past, Gabs is also the founder of XR Vienna, Vienna’s first community of XR professionals. Gabs was under the 20 best European women founders of 2018 and is an active member of Women in Immersive Tech.

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Interview

In this episode I am incredibly happy that I was able to talk to Monica Ares. Monica is a global leader for Immersive Learning, XR and AI. Her immersive journey started as Director of the Dr. William Russell Blake Planetarium in Plymouth, teaching over 5.000 students annually. To bring the benefits of Immersive Learning to more people, she went to Amazon and finally to Meta, where she was responsible to develop VR content with 3rd party developers to create high-quality VR educational experiences for the Oculus App Store among other things. She was knee-deep in the restructuring of Facebook to Meta and the Metaverse hype-times. Monica takes us along her journey until she leaves Meta, explaining what the state of XR means for Immersive Learning, and what it ment for the cause of Immersive Learning when Meta announced the year of efficiency.

„Mark Zuckerberg is a human who cares deeply about education, he always has. […] But often times product roadmaps need to follow what they’re good at. […]. Education is such a good use-case, it’s a hugely scalable market. But it’s only scalable once you can support it.“ says Monica.

Monica just recently moved to London and took over the role of Executive Director of IDEA Lab at the Imperial College.

AWE Europe 2023

Meet Monica Arés at AWE Europe on 24+25 October in Vienna! Meet with the global XR Industry at the most important Conference for XR, Spatial computing and Metaverse, do business, network, and have a drink or three with me, as I will also be attending the hole conference!

And as the Spatial Realities Show is an official partner of AWE, I am happy to be able to give away two two-day tickets. And that’s quite easy! Just send me an email at [email protected]. And with that you will be in the draw to win two free tickets!

And if you don’t want to bet on your luck to get a ticket for free, enjoy the 20 per cent discount code as part of this community. Use Spatial20D to get 20 Per cent of your regular ticket price. Again, use Spatial20D to get 20 per cent discount thanks to our Spatial Realities community discount.

Interview

In the long interview I am happy to talk to Danile Maas from the Danish VR Startup VRPilot. Daniel and his team have been working on a cockpit simulator since he dropped out from a big defense company in late 2019. The first contract was with the Royal Danish Airforce and the team had to show in a couple of months, that they can actually deliver what they sold. From there on the proof of concept convinced many more companies like DHL or Alaska Airlines to use VR Pilot. When COVID hit the globe their approach to use a standalone headset really payed out. Learn in this in-depth interview how VR is a perfect medium to train pilots and prepare them in a safe, fast and cheap way for even the worst situation while being in air. Because you know what they say: Take off is optional, but landing is mandatory!

Partners of the Episode: HTC

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This episode kicks off the collaboration between AWE EU 23 in Vienna and this podcast, in which the community of Spatial Realities profits from some nice perks! In the next few months before the conference, you will be able to listen to exclusive interviews with speakers you can see and hear live at AWE Vienna. Additionally, you can win 3×2 tickets for Europe’s most important XR conference this year in three unannounced episodes (in English).

And if you don’t want to bet on your luck to get a ticket, use SPATIAL20D to get 20% off the ticket for AWE in Vienna 24+25 October.

Interview

„Learning about the history of XR is very important.“ Ori Inbar answers, as I ask where his journey as XR Professional started. As listeners know, I always love to look back into the development of an industry. Especially when the industry is complicated, expensive and needs so much endurance to fulfill its promises as the XR industry does.

Ori continues with an insight which explains why the history lesson is important: „The folks jumping into this industry in the last few years can learn a lot from what happened there. And based on that knowledge and understanding they can prepare better for the future and accelerate the development of this whole industry.“

Ori is not just spouting a hollow phrase here. Before he made his hands dirty in the very beginnings of the XR industry, Ori learned about what the research community had already done in the past decades in Augmented Reality and went to events like Ismar, the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality. When Apple started the age of mobile computing with launching the iPhone, Ori co-founded Ogmento with industry veterans. First access to the camera API was not possible and AR only worked on jail-breaked devices. Ogmento and many more pleed Apple to open up the API which later was done.

That was the start of a whole new AR app industry, which Ori brought together on the first edition of Augmented World Expo, AWE in 2012.

Learn more about the enlightening history of the XR industry in this episode and what Ori has to say about the Metaverse-hype and what the announcement of Apples Vision Pro means for the future of the industry!

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Interview

In early July 2023 the European Commission published a Communication on virtual worlds and Web 4.0. And as publications by the EU are usually long, complicated and have a history of its own, it was good that Patrick Grady published a short summary on his blog Metaverse EU to explain how the Communication can be understood. In it the EU outlines a strategy about how to take leadership in the development of virtual worlds and what we would have called Metaverse in 2022. But the Communication uses the expression Web 4.0, which caused some irritation, expressed by industry professionals. And to talk about the Communication in detail you will hear the recording of my interview with Patrick later in this episode.

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