The AI XR Podcast.

Our guest this week is Ann Hand, CEO of Super League, a brand agency specializing in game platforms like Roblox and Fortnite. The news this week starts with an ironic twist: first people who are losing jobs to AI are people who work in tech. Also, tech's super bowl commercials barely made a sound. Super League started as a platform for eSports marketing but Ann Hand has guided it to become one of the leading brand marketers in spatial computing, otherwise referred to as The Metaverse. Users are spending more and more of their time on these platforms. The company recently announced it was being acquired by Infinite Reality, which has raised over $3 Billion, 

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Charlie, Ted, and Rony welcome Sean Mann, CEO of RP1, whose Metaverse browser can support hundreds of thousands of unique users in a spatial environment. It's earning week in the tech world and the outlook for 2025, after two years of hypergrowth, is downright conservative. Love for Meta's money printing machine continued, despite continued losses on its Metaverse ambitions. Apple's discontinuing AR glasses. Or are they? And Alexa is back. Using RP1's browser, users can share spatial environments, including 1:1 maps of the physical world, on any browser, including VR. Charlie says the MR demo of RP1 that he showed him on Thursday was the most like the mixed reality described in "Snow Crash" he has ever seen. 

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Charlie, Rony & Ted are guestless today. It happens. It was a busy news week. First up, Deepseek. Their model may have been trained on OpenAI. Stealing from the thieves, he called it. Big financing deals we announced this week: Softbank is investing $500 M in Skild Robotics, and Eleven Labs (AI Voices) raised $250 M. Marcus Brownlee takes the new Samsung MR headset for a test drive on YouTube. The copyright office released guidance for AI generated content, offering it protection under the law provided a human is using AI as a tool, not an author. The Gulf of Mexico will be renamed on Google Maps. What about New Mexico? 

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Charlie and Ted welcome Elizabeth Baron, who at Ford Motor Company led Immersive Simulation for Product Development, where she combined design, engineering and manufacturing digital twins together for a holistic review of vehicles. She then moved to the University of Nebraska iEXCEL, where she is leading Intelligent Immersive Simulation to bring AI-based Digital Twins into healthcare. It was a big news week as Trump was inaugurated and had tech on his mind. TikTok got a temporary reprieve, and earned the company's thanks. Trump introduced a $500 B data center deal with OpenAI's Sam Altman, Oracle's Larry Ellison, and Softbank's Mayoshi Son, and they expressed their admiration and gratitude. Not present: Elon Musk and Microsoft. Google buys HTC Vive. Sort of. Elizabeth, is Founder, Immersionary Enterprises, LLC, as well as Senior Advisor, Intelligent Immersive Simulation, UNMC iEXCEL. Formerly Global Lead,  Immersive Reality for Ford Motor Company Product Development. She joined us for an in-depth look at Ford automotive simulation and how the University of Nebraska Medical Center at iEXCEL is teaching, performing research and allowing interdisciplinary collaboration within its med school using simulation, AI and XR.

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This week the hosts welcome Ashley Crowder, CEO of Vntana, which manages CAD drawings and other 3D assets for companies in industries as diverse as fashion and concrete. The news segment was focused on the imminent shut down of TikTok, and rumors Elon will announce a deal to buy the platform before the deadline Sunday night. Biden mentioned tech oligarchs in his farewell address to the nation, and we talk about them, too. Ashley's company has been around twelve years, first focused on consumer marketing and live events before pivoting to solving companies' problems managing and distributing their 3D content. Ashely is also a pioneering female founder, of which there are still precious few today. 

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This week our guest is esteemed journalist Dean Takahasi, dean of tech writers, who helps us analyze this year's CES. News topics on our minds were the LA fires, which have personally affected Charlie and Ted, Meta's big announcement on content moderation, free speech, and Jensen Huang's Nvidia keynote, which promised a new AI-capable personal computer on the edge, and their plans to power a robotics revolution worth trillions. Charlie and Ted found CES a bit disappointing, especially the XR area, which was dominated by Xreal. Meta was also there for the first time, promoting Ray Bans and their MR Quest 3 headset. 

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Charlie, Ted, and Rony have a wide-ranging preview of CES 2025 and what to expect from the coming year from Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association which owns CES. To be sure, we'll be seeing a lot more AI in everything. Mobility, robotics, drones, wearables and healthtech are going to have a strong presence this year as well. Gary has a new book, Pivot or Die, which takes a look at the boom in productivity that companies are going to experience with AI. He is optimistic about the potential for the new administration to create a business environment with reduced regulation and greater freedom to pursue M&A, which will stimulate venture investments in new technologies. This, Gary says, does not mean no regulation, it means the right kind of regulation.

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Charlie, Rony, and Ted are out in full force to greet the world's foremost tech consultant and professor Shelly Palmer, CEO of the Palmer Group. We hit the news quickly, Perplexity raises $500M at a $9B valuation, ChatGPT under assault, AI's coming "clean." Our wide ranging conversation with Shelley was focused on some important trends in AI and XR, and especially the long process of integrating AI into company workflow. It's going to take time and training, perhaps more than five years for that to be happy, Shelly said. Other 2024 events we looked back on: the ongoing AI revolution, the crypto run up, agentic AI, the possible TikTok ban, AI & XR, and the end of the media business as we know it. Audiences are on different screens doing different things. The implications are staggering. It decided the election.  

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This week Charlie and Rony welcome Russell Patton, Product Manager for the Snap Spectacles AR headset. It's a news week rich with AI news from OpenAI, Google, and others. OpenAI suffered a major outage on Wednesday, which may be related, according to Rony, to the theft of weighted models from its database. We thought it was related to stress on the system from the introduction of video generator Sora. Samsung gave the press a look at their upcoming Project Moohan on which they collaborated with Google on an AR OS for Android, and Qualcomm for its new microprocessor. Rony is in his element as discuss the new Spectacles, and Snap's strategy, with Patton. 

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This week Charlie and Ted are joined by Michael Murray, CEO of Kopin (NASDQ: KOPN), a leading developer of microdisplay and optical technologies for military and enterprise applications. Meta needs a hit entertainment franchise for its platforms, so they've made a deal with filmmaker James Cameron, to make one for them. With Elon Musk at the elbow of the President, does his competitor, OpenAI, who Musk is suing, have anything to worry about? Xreal released their new Xreal One Series of assisted reality smart glasses, or screen extenders, which now feature one touch screen anchoring. 

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