E136 - AI Glasses Hackathon & IFA Recap, Hardware News with HTC VIVE Eagle and RayNeo iO and NextApp Feature with Greg Fawsom

10.09.2026•0:01

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. The hosts 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: - Get one of 10 free ticket with the code spatialfree - Get one of 100 tickets for 50% with the code spatial50 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.

E135 - The Headset-Prizes-Game, Bitkom AI Glasses Poll and how to develop for Snap Specs with Ines Hilz & Andrew Douglas (SunfloVR)

27.08.2026•56:30

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. NEWS - The Headset-Price Guess game! Featuring: Pico Space Pro, Steam Frame, Project Phoenix, Meta Ray-Ban Display 2 - Reading Suggestion: Smart Glasses: Why a Ban Is the Wrong Approach - The representative poll of the day by Bitkom: How do you feel about smart glasses? - Link-Tipp: “Harm Through the “#RizzCam”: Smart Glasses, Ambient Capture and Invisible Harassment” - Apples iPhone-Event (September 9): AirPods with cameras!

E134 - Developing for AI Glasses + AI Glasses News with Christoph Spinger from Telekom MMS

06.08.2026•1:01:26

Interview 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! Join the challenge now: https://metaverse-podcast.de/contextual-ai-track-2026/ To get participants hyped and prepared, Christoph sits down with us to share his personal hackathon playbook and insider dev tips: - App Inspiration: One fascinating "True Crime" app concept for location-based AI glasses that Kristoff hasn't built yet—and wants you to steal for the hackathon! - The 48-Hour Hardware Playbook: What is the exact step-by-step strategy when building for AI & AR glasses under time pressure? - Time Allocation: Why half of your hackathon time shouldn't be spent on coding at all—and what you should do instead to impress the jury. - Team Dynamics: How to find the right teammates on-site in under 10 seconds. - Dev Workflow & AI Tooling: Why you don't need to be a full game developer or native engineer anymore to build smart glasses apps, and how AI code editors like Cursor change the game. Hardware Realities: The hidden technical bottlenecks (like Bluetooth speeds) you must consider when connecting smart glasses to a phone. We also discussed these news: - Samsung unveils more Smart Glasses designs at Samsung Unwrapped, July 22nd - OpenAI interested in Smart Glasses, says OpenAI President Greg Brockman. But makes that sense? - Essilor Luxottica, which is partnering with Meta to manufacture the most successful Ai glasses of all times the Meta Ray-Ban, is talking sales numbers: exponential and almost double than comparable time last year.

E133 - Meta's Glasses Drama, Even Realities Hits Unicorn Status & UBTECH's Creepy Companion

16.07.2026•1:20:50

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 on 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 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?

E132 - Meta goes Store Brand: Introducing Meta Glasses

02.07.2026•50:04

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.

E131 - Qualcomms nächster XR SoC, Xreal Aura und Clarence Dadson über Gaussian Splatting und Scanning

25.06.2026•1:24:25

INTERVIEW Zum Interview haben wir Clarence Dadson geladen. Der Geschäftsführer von Design4Real und Vorstandsvorsitzender des Extended Reality Bavaria e.V. beschäftigt sich seit Aufkommen des Hypes mit Gaussian Splatting. Gaussian Splatting sorgt gerade durch seine Technik für Aufbruchstimmung in der Scanning-Landschaft. Durch winkelabhängige Ellipsoide wird ein beispielloser Fotorealismus inklusive komplexer Reflexionen und transparentem Glas möglich, der zuvor sehr viel mehr Zeit in Anspruch genommen hätte oder gar nicht möglich gewesen wäre. Die Erfassung per Kamera oder Scanner ist damit äußerst zugänglich geworden. Ein Vorteil gegenüber der traditionellen Fotogrammetrie. Diese Technik eignet sich ideal für detailreiche, statische Objekte wie Fahrräder, Immobilienpräsentation oder fotorealistische VR-Trainingskulissen. Ganz frei von technischen Hürden ist Gaussian Splating allerdings noch nicht: Die riesigen Datenmengen erfordern enorm leistungsstarke Hardware mit viel Grafikspeicher, und die Software-Integration in gängige Engines wie Unity oder Unreal ist noch sehr rudimentär. Zudem fehlt die nachträgliche Editierbarkeit, da die Scans als untrennbarer Block ohne separate Materialien exportiert werden. Am Ende bleibt es eine kreative Tätigkeit: Wie führe ich den Scanner so, dass ich die Ergebnisse bekomme, die ich haben will? Das Zukunftspotenzial ist riesig, denn Unternehmen wie Gracia AI streamen bereits erfolgreich animierte 4D-Splats, indem sie durch clevere Delta-Kompression die Datenraten drastisch reduzieren. NEWS Qualcomm Snapdragon Reality Elite Xreal Aura