Google's guilty of monopoly practices, but the result will be unclear for some time. Elon Musk continues to go bonkers while raking in trillions, nonetheless, he is suing people who don't like him, like former advertisers and others unhappy with the lack of moderation on their platform. Meta shuttered Echo Arena, and now they're shuttering the studio that makes it, Ready at Dawn, which they acquired in 2020. Our guest is Val Vacante, VP of Solutions Innovation for Dentsu Advertising. She is based in Austin and advises the SXSW festival on programming. Val shares Dentsu's innovative approaches to problematic categories like retail, where many companies are in desperate need of reinvention.

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This week our guest is Kerestell Smith, creator of Gorilla Tag VR and founder of Another Axiom. Rony is on a farm with no Internet. In the news Canva surprises no one with its acquisition of Gen-AI startup Leonardo.ai. Congrats to Hedra AI text-to-voice, which produces lip-synced short video; they raised $10M. Meta reported earnings Weds. Revenue is up a whopping 22%. Our guest Kerestell Smith shares his extraordinary journey, from being an early VR fan and Echo Arena champion to developing Gorilla Tag VR on Unity while he continued his 9-5 corporate job. Kerestell shares the secrets of Gorilla Tag's success: its revolutionary arm locomotion. It is the most popular game on Quest, earning over $100M. Kerestell digs into spatial design principles and his philosophy about virtual reality experiences.

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This week our guest is neuroscientist Dr. Cody Rall. Rony's working his super-secret day job (an AI startup). Top of the news is OpenAI's Search GPT, which is now a close beta (you can sign up); AI start-up Cohere valued at $5.5 B in their latest round. There are more than 20 AI unicorns - startups valued at more than $1B. Elon Musk has a supercomputer cluster in Memphis, and no idea (yet) where the power is coming from. Meta is in the news (constantly). This week their biggie is the release of powerful open source Llama 3.1 AI LLM. Both Reality Labs and Magic Leap saw layoffs. Dr. Rall joins us to talk about psychiatric treatments with BCI, and other methods for healing, and even augment, the brain.

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Charlie and Rony go Tedless this week with Sarah Nagy, founder and CEO of Seek AI, which brings AI to datasets that can be queried with natural language processing and other AI applications. This week's news includes funding for 3D company Jigspace, whose demos are bundled with Apple Vision Pro and tablets. Artificial Agency raised $16M for AI NPCs, and Haiper AI introduces eight second text-to-video gen-AI. Sarah Nagy is a "quant" and data scientist who founded Seek to help companies extract maximum insight and value from their existing data.

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Another big news week finds AMD snapping up Silo AI for $655M. Captions lip dub co raises $60M. Odyssey AI out of stealth with hi-res gen-AI. Infinite Reality Raises $350M, Acquires LandVault in stock deal. Apple is launching the Iphone 16 with AI this fall, but Siri won't be out until Spring 2025. Samsung includes Bixby in its new launch. Our guest is Chandra Devam, CEO of Arismd, a ten year old company that created technology for X-Ray vision.

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This week the news was all about AI, music labels sue AI music generators Suno and Udio. Etched raises $120M to make AI Chips. Emergence AI scores $97.2M to make AI agents for white-collar work. We share our hot takes on Augmented World Expo, which wrapped last week. Tony, a true XR OG and an old friend, joined Rony in the AWE Hall of Fame last week. We're talking about art, music, copyrights, problems in Hollywood, and the responsibilities (or lack thereof) of American companies.

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This 200th episode of "This Week in XR" is recorded with a live audience on AWE's Expo Stage on June 20, 2024. This is the 15th edition of the largest XR conference and expo in the world. We invited five guests who have never been on our show, AWE Program director Sonya Haskins, developer and blogger, Tony Vitillo, Cosmo Scharf, founder of VRLA, and Jenni Ogden, founder of Eye-Q Productions, which specializes in volumetric capture. We shared TWIXR's 2020 origin story, our views of the 15th show, our personal XR journeys, which included Sonya's touching and dramatic tale of self-discovery. We are joined midway by the very first guest, Sarah Hill, founder and CEO of Healium. She's a former broadcaster with an air of professionalism we hoped would rub off on us. Then Andrea Lowery of AWE brought us a cake! Be sure to listen to the end to hear our predictions for AWE 2028.

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This week is show #199. Our guest is Jeri Ellsworth, CEO and Co-Founder of Tilt Five. Next week we'll record show #200 in front of a live audience at AWE in Long Beach, CA. This week we review Apple AI (Apple Intelligence), their cross-platform AI implementation. Also in the news, Mistral raises $600 M to compete with OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic. Sandbox metaverse raises $20M, and achieves unicorn status while unicorn VR Chat lays off 30% of its staff. Jeri Ellsworth is co-founder of the AR tabletop game hardware company Tilt Five, which creates PC-based 3D AR board games that play on a reflective mat. Hardware is hard. Harder when it also needs great software. With Nintendo as its guiding light, against the odds, Tilt Five is building momentum.

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