This Week in XR Podcast

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 created a commercial music video using OpenAI's new tool. Our guest Marta Marciszewicz walks us through how AI animation company Anything World brings characters to life instantly for the games industry. Want your player character attacked by an army of spiders? They've got you covered. Links to socials:- the webpage: anything.world- the linktree with all the links: https://linktr.ee/AnythingWorld- X: https://twitter.com/_AnythingWorld- Discord: https://discord.gg/N64U9RfwsJ (here we have a bot that anyone can use to try out Animate Anything and see how it works in practice for free)- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/anything-world/- instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_anythingworld/- twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/anythingworld (where we have lives every week)- TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@_anythingworld- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe4m3YtFC_Q5OhC-I5dvAzQ- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Anything.World.Worldwide/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/thisweekinxr

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.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/thisweekinxr

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 you to our sponsor, Zappar!Don't forget to like, share, and follow for more! Follow us on all socials @ThisWeekInXR!https://linktr.ee/thisweekinxr

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 minutes of a relatively short show talking about Gabe Newell's BCI startup, Starfish, which is just out of stealth, and the shutdown of the enterprise VR collaboration platform Glue.  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/thisweekinxr

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. Connell was a great guest, nonetheless ICYMI, Zappar is our sponsor. 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/thisweekinxr

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 forget to like, share, and follow for more! Follow us on all socials @ThisWeekInXR!https://linktr.ee/thisweekinxr

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 associations' legislative accomplishments and the challenges facing the industry, including copyright, trademark, and patent regulations - and enforcement. 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/thisweekinxr

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 the killer apps? What will storytellers do with the spatial medium? How quickly can Apple get to an accessible price? What wildcards are out there and, perhaps most importantly, what impact AI will have on spatial computing? https://schedule.sxsw.com/2024/events/PPThank you to our sponsor, Zappar!Don't forget to like, share, and follow for more! Follow us on all socials @ThisWeekInXR!https://linktr.ee/thisweekinxr

Ted and Charlie welcome guest Weili Dai, co-founder Marvell Technologies, Silicon Box, and MeetKai. In the news, Saudi Arabia to invest $40B in AI, Nvidia revealed its new Blackwell AI computer at its GTC Conference, which it calls "AI Woodstock." They also showed off AI for robots. The State of Unreal was the main event at the Game Developers Conference a few dozen miles up the bay in San Francisco. Fortnite paid $320 for user generated content. Apple eyes Google Gemini AI for iPhones. Our guest Weili Dai is probably the most powerful person we've had on the show. Her new company, Silicon Box, is opening factories in Singapore and Italy to make a new kind of semiconductor they call a Chiplet. She is also attacking this new AI architecture through the software startup MeetKai.com. 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/thisweekinxr