Spatial Realities (english)

Thomas Riedel
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Understand the next computing revolution! Spatial Realities is your update on everything related to Extended Reality (XR), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Spatial Computing, and the Metaverse. Tech Journalist Thomas Riedel, together with co-hosts and guests, takes you behind the scenes of major platforms (Apple, Meta, Google, Samsung, HTC Vive, Snap, and more). We discuss trends such as AI glasses, Generative AI, or Gaussian Splatting, and highlight developments that matter to both the B2B industry and gaming enthusiasts. Our topics at a glance: 🚀 Strategy & News: Current developments surrounding visionOS, HorizonOS, Android XR, SnapOS, OpenXR, and much more. 🛠 Industry Insights: How companies are already utilizing XR for training, design, and collaboration today. 🌐 Open Standards: What organizations like the Metaverse Standards Forum and the Alliance for Open USD are doing and why it matters. 🧠 UX & Design: What defines a truly great immersive experience? From ethical questions to hardware analysis: We draw a comprehensive picture of the XR industry. Subscribe to Spatial Realities for deep dives and relevant news from the world of spatial computers. 📝 Note regarding release schedule: This feed focuses on select English-language interviews and specials. Updates here may be less frequent. Do you speak German? Check out our main feed "Spatial Realities (Deutsch)" for weekly updates and over 120 episodes covering the entire XR landscape.

  1. Jun 4

    E130 - What's up, OpenXR? with Frédéric Plourde

    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 organizations. That includes negotiations about which passages stay in the podcast and which do not. Only three small parts were removed from our original recording due to that process. None of them are important for normal people, but very important for people within the OpenXR cosmos, it seems. Why do I mention this? Working on standards like OpenXR is a matter of politics—between big corps, open-source evangelists, and XR enthusiasts. That is what I learned after the podcast recording. In this interview, Thomas Bedenk and I try to get a feeling of where OpenXR stands, how it has developed over the last couple of years, and where it is heading. OpenXR was built in 2017 with the vision to clean up a landscape of messy SDKs. In 2019, version 1.0 was released. But it has only been within the last 18 months that OpenXR has become the quasi-standard for XR development. The reason behind this is not only the existence of standards, but that major stakeholders committed to OpenXR. Google, Meta, Valve, and Pico recognized the necessity of common ground for development. Unity and Unreal committed to OpenXR as their primary interface. But standards alone are not enough if you really want to develop effectively. Monado delivers an open-source runtime which is used throughout the industry. As head of XR, Frédéric and his team are responsible for Monado. Monado is a cross-platform, open-source runtime that implements the OpenXR API to communicate directly with XR hardware like headsets, displays, and trackers. Unlike proprietary systems, its code is fully accessible to the public and is used by major tech companies as the foundational layer for their own XR ecosystems. Although many of the organization's current projects are restricted by NDAs, Frédéric shared insights into a major upcoming feature called multi-app support. This feature will provide a standardized way for multiple independent XR applications to coexist and interact realistically in the same physical space, enabling scenarios like a virtual Pokémon from one app correctly occluding a floating calendar from another.

    1h 15m

  2. Mar 26

    E125 - Will AR glasses kickstart the metaverse? Sean Mann about the Open Metaverse Browser Initiative

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

    1h 31m

  3. Jan 29

    E120 - Inside Cookmate: Developing for Snap Spectacles and The Futures of Smart Glasses with Kanzul Fatima Arif from Headraft

    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 worked closely with Snap to develop Cookmate, a hero project for the American social media and XR leader, which is showcased whenever possible. That is because the app truly impresses with its stellar user interface on the 5th generation Snap Spectacles. While developing Cookmate, Kanzul and her team worked so closely with Snap that she was actually able to influence their development. For example, how pinned objects behave, how fonts are readable best of the Spectacles or how face tracking works for diverse skin tones. At the beginning of this episode, Kanzul tells us her personal XR story: the moving and empowering journey of an Afghan woman who discovers the power of AR to process her own history. She also provides a deep dive into how Headraft handled the shutdown of Spark AR and the situation with 8th Wall and what the agency's strategy looks like now. Finally, she describes in great detail how the team developed Cookmate, which meant stepping away from traditional game development methodologies.

    1h 16m

  4. 12/11/2025

    E117 - UnitedXR: The State of the Metaverse Standards Forum, Standards for AI and what about Apple? with Neil Trevett

    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 Metaverse Standards Forum. Second, Apple’s role in XR—and specifically the tension between the USD and glTF file formats. And finally, how standard organizations are handling the explosion of AI assets and new tech like Gaussian Splatting. This interview is essential listening if you want to understand the strategic side of XR and how to navigate the competing narratives in our industry.

    22 min

  5. 11/14/2025

    E114 - XR Journalism in the Crossfire of Hype and Reality with Antony Vitillo & Jan-Keno Janssen - XRC25

    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. The Guests: Antony Vitillo (LI →), XR Developer and owner of the famous blog "The Ghost Howls" — one of the most popular international XR bloggers — and Jan-Keno Jansen (LI →), Editor at German c't magazine since 2007, an XR reporter since the early Oculus days, and since 2021 host of c't's YouTube Channel 3003, one of the most successful tech channels in Germany. About the Panel "Look Behind the Goggles: XR Journalism in the Crossfire of Hype and Reality" we discussed how reporting about XR has changed over the last ten years. Both Jan-Keno and Antony can tell different storys. Jen-Kenos XR-journey started when he tried one of the first prototypes meeting Palmer Luckey in the US and how he was trying to write about how it feels to be in VR. For Antony the story started with his Blog, which was originaly a marketing blog, but quickly adressed a community which was developer-heavy and craving for facts and numbers. Learn how the panelists handle the growing pressure from US-BigTech in this episode!

    45 min

  6. 07/31/2025

    XR in Space – Augmented Reality for Astronauts on the Moon with Leonie Bensch

    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. Starting 2030 we build the Artemis moon base from where we might conduct complex missions not only on the surface of the moon itself but also to start our journey to Mars. And so that astronauts do not step into a shadow which is actually a hole in the ground, stumble and damage their spacesuit or instruments, an augmented reality interface could be helpful. Leonie Bensch, Doctoral Candidate at the European Space Agency, researches exactly that. In her research she develops AR scenarios in Virtual Reality (VR) to test designs and gather feedback before developing costly physical prototypes. For Example she examines how a grid might help to understand the topographical feature of the moon surface or how far an object is away. No easy task as safety and reliability has top priority in space. Leonie is not only a researcher at ESA. As one of three conference chairs she organized the Space CHI 4.0 conference which took place June 23-24, 2025 at the European Astronaut Center in Cologne. This podcast-special was mainly inspired by that conference, as there were many inspiring talks and keynotes and even two ESA Astronauts taking part.

    1h 6m

  7. 07/17/2025

    XR in Space - Immersive Tech for Space Simulators with Pale Blue CEO Felix Gorbatsevich

    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 Keynote was hold at the Space CHI 4.0 Conference (→) back in June 23-24 at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne. Our recording takes place a month later. Felix Gorbatsevich is the CEO and co-founder of the Norwegian company Pale Blue, which is specialized in simulation and training simulators for various industries, including human spaceflight and subsea operations. In this episode we are particularely discussing how they were involved in a couple of experiments involving parabolic flights. Felix explains how they used them to find out how XR headsets can work in zero gravity and micro gravity as well as scanning how astronauts actually move in Zero G on a space spation. These information were than used to make training on their virtual reality model of the ISS even more realistic. Pale Blue is particularly known for its highly detailed digital twin of the International Space Station (ISS), which models the station down to individual screws and stickers for realistic astronaut training. This simulator is crucial for helping astronauts become resilient to zero-gravity sickness by creating a disconnect between visual and physical sensation. Pale Blue also applies its simulation technology to validate new spacecraft designs, such as the Luna Gateway, and participates in the SpaceXR Consortium to develop robust XR solutions for actual space missions, including intra-vehicular (IVA) and extra-vehicular (EVA) activities. At the end of the episode Felix is asked to articulate his expert opinion about the XR industry, with over 10 years of experience. And how he thinks how XR and the space industry is connected.

    1h 14m

  8. 02/17/2025

    E093 - Mixed Reality Report 2024 with Gabriele Romagnoli / Aurea Award Recap

    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 the report as well as what that means for the state of the industry. About the report The report analyzes 400+ mixed reality (MR) apps, primarily from the Meta Quest store, to understand ecosystem evolution and user preferences. It finds a near 50/50 split between gaming and non-gaming MR apps, though gaming titles receive more ratings and higher average ratings. While action, puzzle, and sports are popular gaming categories, fitness and productivity dominate the non-gaming space, with many non-gaming apps still considered tech demos. Gabriele suggests MR development has been slow due to technical challenges, a small user base, and the difficulty of creating compelling MR experiences. The report concludes with a look at AI-integrated apps and co-located experiences, and Gabriele plans to continue tracking the MR app landscape.

    1h 6m
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About

Understand the next computing revolution! Spatial Realities is your update on everything related to Extended Reality (XR), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Spatial Computing, and the Metaverse. Tech Journalist Thomas Riedel, together with co-hosts and guests, takes you behind the scenes of major platforms (Apple, Meta, Google, Samsung, HTC Vive, Snap, and more). We discuss trends such as AI glasses, Generative AI, or Gaussian Splatting, and highlight developments that matter to both the B2B industry and gaming enthusiasts. Our topics at a glance: 🚀 Strategy & News: Current developments surrounding visionOS, HorizonOS, Android XR, SnapOS, OpenXR, and much more. 🛠 Industry Insights: How companies are already utilizing XR for training, design, and collaboration today. 🌐 Open Standards: What organizations like the Metaverse Standards Forum and the Alliance for Open USD are doing and why it matters. 🧠 UX & Design: What defines a truly great immersive experience? From ethical questions to hardware analysis: We draw a comprehensive picture of the XR industry. Subscribe to Spatial Realities for deep dives and relevant news from the world of spatial computers. 📝 Note regarding release schedule: This feed focuses on select English-language interviews and specials. Updates here may be less frequent. Do you speak German? Check out our main feed "Spatial Realities (Deutsch)" for weekly updates and over 120 episodes covering the entire XR landscape.

Information

  • Creator
    Thomas Riedel
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    14
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
  • Show Website
    Spatial Realities (english)

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