Spatial Realities (english)

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...

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! PARTNER OF THE EPISODE: https://immersive-x.de 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 M...

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 fragment...

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...

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 ne...

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 s...

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 chal...

And here they are! In this special episode of Spatial Realities we dive into the highly anticipated reveal of the new Snap Specs at the AWE 2026 conference. We take a close look at the hardware of this new AR device, exploring how its weight, display technology, and pricing compare to previous generations and competitors on the market. We also discuss the newly introduced AI-driven Lens Studio too...

This interview was originally sourced during my coverage of XR Expo. Frédéric is always wearing two hats, he repeats whenever he can. One is as the head of the XR Division at Collabora. The other is the hat of an Outreach Officer for OpenXR. When you work with him as a journalist, you recognize that immediately. He is always aware of what he can and cannot say, driven by the politics within his or...

Podcast for XR, AI Glasses, Smart Glasses, Spatial Computing and the Metaverse since 2021, hosted by German tech-journalist Thomas Riedel.

Not much is known about Snap’s next device, except what CEO Evan Spiegel shared last year during their annual Lens Fest. The device promises to be better, smaller, more beautiful, and so on. Sure :-) If there is one person outside of Snap who is best positioned to know what’s going on at the company and how they work, it might be Kanzul Fatima Arif. As the Head of Innovation at Headraft, she worke...

Today, we are heading to Brussels. At the premiere of UnitedXR (YouTube →), I sat down with an absolute heavyweight of the industry: Neil Trevett. If you work in graphics, you know Neil. He is the VP of Developer Ecosystems at NVIDIA, President of the Khronos Group, and Chair of the Metaverse Standards Forum. In this conversation, we dive deep into three key topics: First, the current state of the...

This Episode contains a recording of a panel I moderated at the second nextReality. Festival in Hamburg. The Festival is framing Germanys oldest XR prize, the nextReality. Contest. Transparency annotation: Spatial Realities is a media partner of the nextReality. Festival. Although travelcosts have been covered by nextReality Hamburg e. V., my opinion and this reporting still remails independent. T...

This is the ignite episode of "XR in Space", a Spatial Realities podcast-special. Imagine a shadow so black, it could be a hole. And if you drop something into it, it's practical gone. That's a realistic scenario for future moon missions. As the moon has no atmosphere, light is not dispersed nor weekend at air molecules leading to brutal light conditions you can not imagine as an earthling. Starti...

This Episode is part of the "XR in Space" Series. There was one moment in Felix' keynote, where everybody was thinking the same: How can I get this insanely detailed model of the ISS onto my headset? No wonder that this was the first question asked after the keynote. And funnily enough it was even the question of co-host Thomas Bedenk, when Felix talks about the ISS model in this episode. The Keyn...

In this Episode the Thomas² talk with Gabriele Romagnoli about his lately published Mixed Reality Report. The XR Expert took a laborious challenge: Find and categorize XR Apps mainly at the Quest Store which are Mixed Reality. But what does that even mean? Gabriele decided to be rather rigorous with the categories instead of shotgunning all the categories on one app. We talk about the results of t...

Welcome to 2024 and welcome to the age of Spatial Computing! At least that is what Apple wants us to believe. And they push hard and swift to proof they want to make it happen. So much, that they just announced to release the Apple Vision Pro as early as February 2nd 2024! That is indeed "Early next year". But that is not enough: Within their developer website they ask developers not to use the wo...

Interview In this Interview I am happy to welcome Gabriella (Gabs) Chihan-Stanley. She is co-founder and communications manager of XR Content Production Company Vrisch, which just has been nominated with a project at the VR Awards and already won a lot of them in the past, Gabs is also the founder of XR Vienna, Vienna's first community of XR professionals. Gabs was under the 20 best European women...

Interview In this episode I am incredibly happy that I was able to talk to Monica Ares. Monica is a global leader for Immersive Learning, XR and AI. Her immersive journey started as Director of the Dr. William Russell Blake Planetarium in Plymouth, teaching over 5.000 students annually. To bring the benefits of Immersive Learning to more people, she went to Amazon and finally to Meta, where she wa...

Interview In the long interview I am happy to talk to Danile Maas from the Danish VR Startup VRPilot. Daniel and his team have been working on a cockpit simulator since he dropped out from a big defense company in late 2019. The first contract was with the Royal Danish Airforce and the team had to show in a couple of months, that they can actually deliver what they sold. From there on the proof of...

This episode kicks off the collaboration between AWE EU 23 in Vienna and this podcast, in which the community of Spatial Realities profits from some nice perks! In the next few months before the conference, you will be able to listen to exclusive interviews with speakers you can see and hear live at AWE Vienna. Additionally, you can win 3x2 tickets for Europe's most important XR conference this ye...

Subscribe to the English only RSS feed here: https://metaverse-podcast.de/show/en/feed/mp3/ INTERVIEW In early July 2023 the European Commission published a Communication on virtual worlds and Web 4.0. And as publications by the EU are usually long, complicated and have a history of its own, it was good that Patrick Grady published a short summary on his blog Metaverse EU to explain how the Commun...