Charlie and Ted, having recovered from SXSW, are back in their respective man caves, while Rony is on cell, driving through Alabama. Our SXSW panel talk will be posted in three weeks but can be found right now on the SXSW site. After a brief overview of three AI funding stories, we turned our attention back to SXSW, but other topics intruded: the potential of a TikTok ban, social media algorithms, and the ongoing OpenAI copyright mess. Our guests this week are SXSW XR experience Jury Prize Winner, Matthew Niederhauser, co-director of The Golden Key. Also joining us is Laura Mingail, a former Entertainment One executive and consultant who has been advising SXSW on XR since its beginning. 

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Charlie and Ted, having recovered from SXSW, are back in their respective man caves, while Rony is on cell, driving through Alabama. Our SXSW panel talk will be posted in three weeks, but can be found right now on the SXSW site. After a brief overview of three AI funding stories, we turned our attention back to SXSW, but other topics intruded: the potential of a TikTok ban, social media algorithms, and the ongoing OpenAI copyright mess. Our guests this week are SXSW XR experience Jury Prize Winner, Matthew Niederhauser, co-director of The Golden Key. Also joining us is Laura Mingail, a former Entertainment One executive and consultant who has been advising SXSW on XR since its beginning. 

Thank you to our sponsor, Zappar!

Don't forget to like, share, and follow for more! Follow us on all socials @ThisWeekInXR!

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Charlie is solo at SXSW while Ted and Rony are in transit. We'll be posting our Tuesday panel on the future of XR in the age of Apple Vision Pro at the end of next week. Not a big news week. The Sora freakout continues as they drop more tests on the socials. In AI, Haiper emerges from stealth with $13.5 M to take on Runway. Jabali raised $5M to use AI to prompt video games into existence. My guest is Lucas Martell, the Austin-based CEO of Mighty Coconut, producer of the hit VR game "Walkabout Mini Golf," which has released over two dozen courses, or DLCs, including one based on "Wallace and Gromit," which was announced today. 

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Charlie and Ted are without Rony, who is driving across the country. We'll convene at SXSW in Austin to do our show live on stage with Joanna Popper in a session titled "XR in the Age of Vision Pro" on March 12th. In the news, $675M for Figure AI's humanoid robots, powered by ChatGPT, and a new text-to-video tool, Ideogram. Our guests this week are Hugh Forrest, head of programming for SXSW and Blake Kammerdiner, head of XR at SXSW who give us a wide-ranging look at this year's show. To say Ted and Charlie are fanboys would be putting it mildly. 

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The hosts are in fine form as they dissect the AI boom, which will have an internet-like impact on the economy, society, and culture as the Internet, and will happen much, much faster. Nvidia's explosive earnings are a bigger news story than the US returning to the moon. That's how big it is. To discuss the complications and opportunity AI represents to higher education, our guest is Katie Conrad, Professor of English at the University of Kansas. She is the author of A Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights for Education. 

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This week our guest is Susanne Haspinger, COO of Hololight. Rony's at an AI Medical conference. The big news is OpenAI's reveal of expanded memory for ChatGPT and the tease of the next Dall-E upgrade, a text-to-video app called Sora, which is capable of generating up to a minute of video from a single prompt. Nvidia, now the world's third largest company, introduced Chat RTX for PCs that will search across local files. The legal battles of OpenAI may be breaking in its favor. Susanne, who was one of the co-founders of Hololight, talks with us about Hololight's work in cloud streaming XR content and working with automakers and defense contractors on their use of the industrial metaverse, which she predicts will have major ROI and other breakthroughs in 2024. 

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We recorded one of our best shows this morning with Cinematic AI Filmmakers Caleb & Shelby Ward. If you have not seen their hilarious Wes Anderson Star Wars trailer you are missing a treat. Meanwhile, the week rewarded us with some big news: Disney puts up $15B for Epic to make their game and entertainment universe, Ted is in love - with his new Apple Vision Pro, Google replaces Bard with Gemini, and deep fakes fool a Hong Kong bank into wiring $25M. Status Pro VR, Polycam 3D, Camb.ai, Atlas 3D, All Score Funding. Then Caleb and Shelby, of Curious Refuge, give us a fantastic look at the future of film.

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This week the hosts are together, live and in-person *for the first time* from the glamorous Sunset Marquis in Los Angeles. It's a propitious day on top of that, of course, as today is 2-2-24, the official launch day of the Apple Vision Pro. In addition, Meta reported a record quarter, a record dividend, a stock buyback, and a successful Christmas season for its Reality Labs division. The stock shot up fifteen percent. This is just twenty-four hours after CEO Zuck was flogged in Washington, DC (again). The plot thickens as we bring in Xreal's raise of $60M to release its Xreal Air2 Ultra, a $600 alternative to the AVP. Our guest is Tommy Palm, CEO of Resolution Games, which released a game studio on the Pro store today. 

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Ted is doing his real job for Viacom today but Rony is with us, while on a ferry in Florida, en route to a secret rendezvous. In the news: Eleven Labs raising $80M for voice cloning, $6.7M for Artisse AI photo app for models and influencers, and the new Rabbit R1 a compact, toy-like $200 handheld AI "Large Action Model" that knows you and your apps. Rony says the price is so low, China must be underwriting it as part of another insidious TikTok-like scheme to steal your data. Our guest is David Weinstein, Senior Director of XR at Nvidia. He takes on a fascinating deep dive into Nvidia's XR strategy, which has four pillars: (1) photorealism, (2) AI, (3) Streaming/split rendering, and (4) collaboration, all taking place in the Omniverse, which David describes as XR's "simulation engine." 

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Jason McDowall of the AR Show podcast sits in the co-host chair as Ted and Rony are traveling. They missed a great show. With Rony absent we take a deep dive into troubles at Magic Leap and how its recent raise of $590M of debt financing from its majority shareholder, Saudi Arabia, is actually bad news. If they didn't get there with the last infusion of half a billion dollars, how do they get to profitability this time around? Our guest is consultant Shelly Palmer of the Palmer Group. He is a professor at the Newhouse School, and a technology and strategy consultant to some of the biggest companies in the world, including Samsung, Meta, Ford and Nike. Shelly has deep insight into how businesses need to change and adapt to what he calls "the generative age." 

Resources to our guests' websites:

https://shellypalmer.com/

https://www.thearshow.com/

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