Spatial Realities

Totally against the trend, the team around CEO and co-founder of SideQuest Shane Harris just relaunched AltspaceVR, one of the most popular social VR experiences—until it was sunset three years ago (Episode E030 in German).

While more and more experiences get shut down, Shane believes that this is actually the best moment for AltspaceVR: „I think some people could easily think that I’m nuts for trying to do that right now. And I understand that. But I actually think that this time right now, here today is probably a more hospitable time for something like this to exist than Altspace ever had over the entirety of its nearly a decade long existence. And the reason for that is primarily that with all these other platforms gone, there is really no competition for what Altspace can provide.“

What does AltspaceVR provide what no other platform does? For one, it brings an iconic campfire that helped kickstart events like Immersive X, and is a symbol of coming together like no other experience has. But let’s say the community of more grown-up, serious creators and event organizers made it a place for everybody who already completed their puberty vocal change. With all providers leaving the sinking ship of social VR, it might also just be the best investment opportunity for brands like that.

When we recorded this episode with the new boss of AltspaceVR, the social VR experience had been live for a week. His team worked for over a year to reinstate what Altspace was before its sunset. And the community seems enthusiastic and already started creating and uploading worlds.

First malicious users appear, which one might read as a sign of relevance. So the relatively small team of about 20 people has to build moderation tools for now. But of course, new features are also supposed to come in the years ahead. All that with the support of generative AI, which for now is only being used to support developing code and finding bugs, as Shane explains. That creators and creatives are important, Shane Harris keeps saying. They even paid the designer of the original robot avatar to design a modern version of it.

Shane Harris also got the chance to speak about the history of SideQuest, which started with Shane’s Editor, an editor which was built for AltspaceVR so that you could build worlds without being a developer in the first place. The problem: Meta never accepted the app in the app store, which triggered Harris to start SideQuest in the first place. What followed was support by Palmer Luckey and a 12-million US-dollar investment by Google.

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Like in the old days: This is an atmospheric solo episode with Thomas Riedel.

THE NEWS

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INTERVIEW

Das Team auf der re:publica in Düsseldorf hat gut abgeliefert. Nach meinem nicht unkritischen aber zugegebenermaßen neutralerem Vortrag, lieferte Paulina Porten im Anschluss mit ihrem Vortrag „Leave Kylie Jenner Alone“ genau den Finger in die Wunde, den der Tech-Branche völlig egal ist: Meta, aber auch andere Hersteller, inszenieren KI-Brillen wie im Falle Metas mit Kylie Jenner als hyperstylisches Lifestyle-Gadget und setzt auf klassisches Pinkwashing. Weiblichkeit wird hier als vertrauensstiftende Fassade genutzt, während dieselben Brillen draußen im Alltag reale Gefahren für Frauen – etwa durch Spanner und Rizzfluencer – befeuern. Paulinas klare Botschaft: Statt oberflächlicher PR-Kampagnen braucht es echtes Safety by Design und viel mehr diverse, feministische Perspektiven in den Entwicklungs- und Chefetagen.

Wie Paulina zu XR kam? 2018 rutschte sie während ihres Designstudiums eher durch Zufall in einen AR-Kurs, weil alle anderen Kurse voll waren – und blieb fasziniert an der Schnittstelle von digitaler und analoger Welt hängen. Nach Arbeiten zu Bürgerbeteiligung (Augmented Participation) und Technologievermittlung stieß sie auf Studien zum Digital Gender Gap und die strukturellen Hürden, die Frauen in der Tech-Welt ausbremsen.

Es kam schließlich alles zusammen im Kölner Startup FemReality, dass sie 2025 gründet. Mit gendersensiblen XR-Workshops bringt sie Jugendliche – und insbesondere Mädchen – direkt an Schulen und außerschulischen Lernorten mit immersiver Technologie in Kontakt. Über spielerisches Learning by Creating mit VR-Tools wie Open Brush und Design Thinking gestalten die Jugendlichen eigene Zukunftsszenarien (wie nachhaltige Städte im Projekt mit RheinEnergie). Das baut Berührungsängste vor Hardware und Software ab und begeistert junge Talente nachhaltig für technische Ausbildungsberufe.

Weitere Themen:

WATCHING FILMS IN VR: DRAYMOND GREEN & IMMERSIVE STORYTELLING
Thomas Riedel and Thomas Bedenk checked out Meta Quest’s new docuseries Open Season featuring NBA bad boy Draymond Green, and they’re definitely digging the 180-degree stereoscopic setup shot on Blackmagic Ursa cams. You genuinely feel like you’re riding shotgun in his Porsche, but whether this kind of expensive, subsidized storytelling will ever turn a real profit remains a big question mark.

FOV DRAMA: THE NEW META VR GLASSES
VR enthusiasts are already whining about the rumored 70-degree field of view and Meta’s 54-degree dev safe zone, but the hosts aren’t sweating it. Sure, following a fast-moving ball in sports might suck with a narrower view, but paired with crisp OLEDs, it’s more than enough screen real estate to chill on the couch and binge movies.

HARDWARE LEAKS: SAMSUNG’S INCOMING SMART GLASSES Spotted
FCC filings hint that Samsung is finally getting ready to drop its own displayless AI glasses, teaming up with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster for a bunch of frame styles. As an Android fanboy, Thomas is hyped to get proper ecosystem integration and give Meta some much-needed competition in the wearable game.

LASERS TO THE EYE: TDK’S DIRECT RETINAL PROJECTION
TDK showed off a new setup that bounces lasers straight onto your retina via meta-optic mirrors, neatly killing the annoying vergence-accommodation conflict. It could pave the way for super slim, normal-looking frames, but with monochrome green visuals and the nightmare of needing pinpoint eye tracking, it’s not taking over the world just yet.

Is Meta serious about confidential VMs for Muse?
Is Charm targeted at kids?
Are Meta VR Glasses the best VR glasses yet?

In this episode Thomas and Thomas are discussing Meta Connect revelations of 2026!

Five years after the metaverse hype, we find ourselves in an era defined by smart glasses and compute pucks. That is the central takeaway from this Meta Connect special of Spatial Realities, where Thomas Bedenk and I sat down right after the keynote to analyze Meta’s latest announcements and what they mean for the XR landscape.

The clear centerpiece of Meta’s strategy is AI, spearheaded by Meta Muse—an autonomous agent running in private virtual machines designed to plan, purchase, and manage everyday digital life. Alongside Muse came an unexpected hardware companion: the Muse Charm. Shaped like a Tamagotchi with a display, camera, and 5G connectivity, it strips the assistant down into a standalone, approachable physical token. But while it feels accessible, it also raises immediate questions about target audiences, privacy boundaries, and how comfortable we truly are handing over our digital routines to an AI ecosystem.

On the glasses front, Meta expanded its hardware lineup across multiple tiers. Most notable is the move into pure audio glasses without cameras, trading optical data capture for privacy-conscious users, lighter weight, and extended battery life. Meanwhile, the flagship Ray-Ban Meta line received a Gen 3 upgrade featuring slimmer frames, improved battery life, six microphones, and Dolby Atmos spatial audio capture, accompanied by new frame styles and software-driven hearing corrections.

The most discussed hardware of the night, however, was the new Meta VR glasses. Positioned with the tri-part marketing pitch „cinema, computer, console,“ the device weighs roughly 100 grams on the face by offloading its processing and battery into a wired pocket puck. With micro-OLED displays running at 120 Hz, downward-facing cameras for hand tracking, and integrated eye tracking, Meta aims to deliver a high-clarity spatial viewer rather than an ultra-wide FOV headset. It serves as a spiritual successor to the Quest Pro line, sacrificing peripheral immersion for portability, high PPD sharpness, and lighter wear.

At $1,299, the VR glasses mark a distinct shift toward portable media consumption and lightweight computing. Yet, as we examine in our discussion, Meta’s recurring bottleneck remains unchanged: while hardware form factors are shrinking into practical devices, the ecosystem still lacks dedicated, mature productivity software to turn spatial computing into an indispensable everyday tool.

PARTNER OF THE EPISODE: IMMERSIVE X

IFA BERLIN RECAP

In this Episode Thomas Riedel and Thomas Bedenk share their takeaways from IFA Berlin, balancing stage debates on the societal impact and privacy of smart glasses with hands-on tests of new hardware from RayNeo, Rokid and Meta. Cutting through the show floor’s generic gadget noise, they highlight Android XR as a much-needed unifying layer to standardize development across fragmented wearable form factors.

HARDWARE NEWS & INDUSTRY ANNOUNCEMENTS

HTC is doubling down on smart glasses as traditional revenue streams decline, expanding the Vive Eagle into North America, Europe, and Australia. We examine its rounded Panto design, slow-motion capture, and snap-on magnetic battery, alongside the viability of its post-trial AI subscriptions. They also look ahead to Meta’s newly announced workflow tool Muse and its upcoming glasses integration, followed by expectations for Apple’s imminent product event. Because if the ApirPod Cameras are coming that is Spatial Computing!

FEATURE: NEXTAPP DEVCON & BRIDGING MOBILE, GAMING, AND XR

Where will the developer base for mass-market XR originate? NextApp CEO Greg Fawson traces the event’s journey from Berlin’s 2009 Android meetups to a cross-platform summit, arguing that mainstream mobile engineers hold the real key to scaling spatial software. Previewing the upcoming three-day conference, the discussion covers dedicated tracks for XR, mobile gaming, and agentic AI coding, emphasizing the need for open community exchange to solve shared platform bottlenecks.

Get your tickets for NextAppCon here:

GenAI transparency notification: For this episode the audio of Greg has been optimized using the speach improvement tool of Adobe Podcast. No edits have been made with GenAI and no additional content was generated. All edits are made by hand with Adobe Audition.

INTERVIEW

What do you do when you meet somebody at a hackathon you work really well with? You found a new company! That is exactly what Ines Hilz and Andrew Douglas did after teaming up at a Meta Hackathon in London, going on to launch Sunflower VR and develop their new AI-driven AR try-on mirror, Aeva Display. In the interview, they delve into developing within Snap’s ecosystem, highlighting how Lens Studio’s AI-assisted toolset, agentic workflows, and environmental tracking features empower creators. Finally, they share crucial advice for hackathon participants developing for Snap Spectacles, emphasizing the necessity of testing frequently on-device to properly calibrate typography, color palettes, and transparency for additive holographic displays.

Tipp: How to utilize the Snap Spectacles to simulate AI Glasses to controll your local Ai Agents from anywhere just using the glasses.

NEWS

GenAI transparency notification: For this episode the audio of the three guests has been optimized using the speach improvement tool of Adobe Podcst. No edits have been made with GenAI and no additional content was generated. All edits are made by hand with Adobe Audition.

Christoph Spinger is an XR Expert Engineer at Telekom MMS. When he isn’t leading teams and building cutting-edge products for clients, he regularly takes home prizes at contests and hackathons. Most recently, he won the XRCC Hackathon, currently the most important XR hackathon in Germany. His winning entry, „Handslation“, translates any object you hold in your hand to help you learn a new language. In his case: Korean. He built the app for both the Pico 4 Ultra and the Rokid AI glasses.

Another highlight from his portfolio is Ballee, an experimental project exploring real-time object detection by bringing physical balls into interactive mixed reality scenarios.

As one of the most active XR developers in the scene today, Christoph will be joining the upcoming AI Hackathon at STARTPLATZ (Sept 4–6 in Cologne) as a mentor and jury member for the „Contextual AI Challenge“ track. So you can really profit from his experience and excellence!

To get participants hyped and prepared, Christoph sits down with us to share his personal hackathon playbook and insider dev tips:

With the summer holidays just around the corner, we gather for one last comprehensive round of XR news before the seasonal slowdown.

→ Inspired by Josef Erl’s latest newsletter on heise.de — where he declares the end of all-rounder headsets and proposes four new VR categories — Thomas and I discuss what the upcoming autumn hardware wave will actually deliver.

→ We also untangle the latest rumors surrounding Meta’s smart glasses: from „supersensing“ devices without privacy LEDs switched off to Meta’s aggressive countermeasures against hardware tampering. Plus: Meta is testing paid AI subscriptions. Meanwhile, Illinois has banned smart glasses behind the wheel entirely—we analyze the reasoning behind this drastic move.

→ In financial news, Even Realities has officially reached unicorn status with a new $150 million investment round. We look at why their camera-free, monochrome display approach is winning over investors.

→ Furthermore, the first dedicated Metaverse browser Artemis has launched, Thomas is explaining what it can actually do and we share our initial impressions.

→ Finally, we look at UBTECH’s new U1 companion. Is this humanoid robot genuinely the future of home assistance, or is it just a highly uncanny, overly flexible smart speaker on legs?

Whatever you do this summer: Keep a cool head and be prepared. For that we suggest our XR calendar with all XR events you need.

The strategy to go with an already well-established brand has been contested by its own creator: Meta introduced Meta Ray-Ban glasses three years ago and created a blueprint which was supposed to explain why suddenly a lot of normal, non-XR people were buying AI glasses.

Now, Meta has announced Meta Glasses; their own „store brand,“ cheaper but supposedly as good as the branded version, which challenges that blueprint. Thomas Bedenk and I, as well as many of you out there, have been asking why Meta is doing that. Sure, cheaper might always be better for wider adoption. Removing a designer glasses brand can make a product cheaper. But will it also remove the appeal? Will people wear glasses with a Meta logo on them? Was Meta forced to go cheaper because the trajectory already showed signs of slowing down? And what role does EssilorLuxottica play in this?

The long-time partner, which is 3% owned by Meta and has a 10-year deal signed up to 2034, is not only profiting hugely from that cooperation. It is also in a situation where it could put pressure on its partner. The Italian-French corporation EssilorLuxottica might even be concerned about its own brand integrity regarding what Meta is doing concerning privacy and AI. Maybe EssilorLuxottica halted further brand cooperation without retracting access to its production facilities, we speculate.

In this episode, we are analyzing Meta’s newest attempt in the smart glasses industry it created, and we share a clear position on whether you should buy these now-cheapest, but still great-looking, smart glasses.