The AI XR Podcast.

Irena Cronin has been studying XR since 2016 — first as Robert Scoble's co-author, now as CEO of Infinite Retina, consulting for clients from IKEA's labs division to a major law firm tracking the industry. She joins Charlie, Ted, and Rony for a blunt assessment of how the biggest companies in tech actually operate.

The centerpiece is Rony's question: Meta has spent roughly $120 billion on Reality Labs since acquiring Oculus. Where did it all go? Irena's answer is unsparing — complete mismanagement, no follow-up, and a lack of imagination that money can't fix. Apple gets a different diagnosis. Irena tracked the Vision Pro through hundreds of iterations since 2019 and predicted exactly how it would land. Her real news: it isn't dead. People inside Apple are still working on it intensely while the glasses project ramps up. The news segment covers OpenAI's Apple IP scandal and whether the Valley now operates in a post-IP world.

Key Moments:
[00:01:30] OpenAI caught in Apple's cookie jar — IP theft accusations on the eve of the IPO
[00:05:00] Sherlocking and the post-IP world — how big companies strip-mine startups through fake M&A talks
[00:12:00] AI regulation — Hassabis, Altman, and Amodei; Rony's case for why the public gets Cessnas, not F-47s
[00:18:45] Irena joins — Infinite Retina, IKEA, and why physical AI is just spatial computing renamed
[00:24:30] Why isn't anyone afraid of Google? — fifteen years of planetary data and no strategy to use it
[00:33:30] Where did Meta's $120 billion go? — "complete mismanagement" and a failure of imagination
[00:38:00] The Vision Pro isn't dead — Apple is still working on it intensely as the glasses ramp up
[00:41:45] Why is XR so obscenely hard? — the industry chased consumers before enterprise
[00:44:30] The display is everything — why smart glasses "go bonkers" the moment AR hits the lens

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Justin Barad is a pediatric orthopedic surgeon, a former Activision game developer, and the founder of Osso VR — one of the few companies in XR that has quietly built a real, profitable business while most of the industry was still searching for one. He joins Charlie and Ted to talk about why virtual reality turned out to be uniquely suited to medical training, and why the way we train surgeons today is still built on a model developed in the 1800s by a brilliant doctor with a serious drug problem.

The core argument of the episode is simple: you should not practice on patients. The aviation industry figured this out decades ago — pilots recertify in simulators, not planes. Medicine has been slower to get there, but Osso VR is making the case with data. Nine published studies. Used in 50 countries. Over 300 training modules. And an objective assessment system that, in one study, showed a 230% performance difference between surgeons measured to be competent and surgeons who simply felt ready.

Justin and Ted go deep on why objective assessment is the real power of the technology, not the immersion. They talk about why the residency model hasn't fundamentally changed since the 1890s, what it would take to actually shorten the 14-year road to becoming a surgeon, and why the company's most exciting growth right now isn't surgeons at all — it's nurses and allied health professionals, a market that dwarfs surgery by a factor of ten. The episode closes on an honest look back at 2016, when everyone in XR thought they were a year or two away from changing everything, and what Justin learned from being one of the first people to test those assumptions against reality.

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This week, Charlie, Ted, and Rony are joined by Kevin Williams — ex-Walt Disney Imagineer, location-based entertainment specialist, publisher of The Stinger Report, and the curator behind the LBE XR Zone at AWE 2026.

Kevin pulls back the curtain on why well-funded VR pioneers like The Void and Dreamscape really collapsed (spoiler: it wasn't COVID), why Sandbox VR and Zero Latency survived, and how "competitive socializing" venues are quietly becoming XR's most viable business.

Plus: Alex Karp's jaw-dropping CNBC appearance, Ted's "printer ink theory" of AI economics, and the decades-old simulation lessons that could have solved VR motion sickness years earlier.

⏱️ KEY MOMENTS
02:42 – Alex Karp's CNBC interview: AI, data & sovereignty
08:40 – Ted's printer ink theory of AI economics
09:54 – Computational autocracies & America's 250th
13:07 – Guest intro: Kevin Williams (ex-Disney Imagineer, The Stinger Report)
17:15 – Theme parks vs. LBE: where's the line?
21:16 – Glow's Magic Leap 2 graffiti experience at AWE
23:14 – Rony's story: a famous graffiti artist tries digital spray paint
25:19 – The open digital mesh problem: RP1, Niantic & who owns the map
30:10 – Why The Void and Dreamscape really failed ("one and done")
34:48 – What bowling alleys and pubs get right: competitive socializing
40:43 – Europa Park's mixed reality attractions
43:09 – Universal's Mario Kart AR ride: why less is more
46:08 – The Dracula/Frankenstein ride & the "squeezing" motion sickness fix
49:19 – Why VR makes you sick: the poisoning response & 30 years of forgotten simulation lessons
52:10 – The case for sharing knowledge before it's lost

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Eline Van Der Velden did musical theatre, then got a master's in physics with plans to work in nuclear fusion, then went back to acting, built a BBC award-winning YouTube comedy series, started a production company, and just four years ago converted it into an AI production company called Particle6. That backstory alone would make for a good Marvel backstory. Then, she created Tilly Norwood.

Tilly is a synthetic AI actress, and when Particle6 dropped her into the world, Hollywood reacted in a way it hadn't reacted to digital humans in twenty years of trying — Tupac, Lil Mikayla, Epic's Unreal Engine characters, Magic Leap's Mica, none of them landed the same way. Eline's explanation is simple: Tilly was the first one that looked really real. She arrived at a moment when emotions in the industry were already running high, and she became the lightning rod for everything people feared AI would do to actors and the creative workforce.

The conversation goes deep on what it actually takes to build a synthetic performer, where the IP and copyright lines are, why Eline built clear internal AI ethics policy for Particle6, and why Tilly wasn't modelled on any existing actor by design.

The episode opens with AWE wrap-up from Charlie, Ted, and Rony — Snap Spectacles at $2,200, the gray zone problem that has haunted every headset since HoloLens, Project Aura from XREAL finally impressing Charlie, Cosm getting $100 million from Sony, and why Rony thinks building XR has cost more money than going to space.

Note: Charlie's audio dropped near the end of the episode, so Ted and Rony close out the conversation.

Key Moments:
[00:01:30] AWE wrap — starting with Snap Spectacles debut at $2,200
[00:08:00] The gray zone — Rony on why AR headsets have cost more to develop than SpaceX, and why consumers won't go to the gray zone
[00:12:45] Project Aura from XREAL
[00:13:30] Cosm gets $100M from Sony — Is it the next Top Golf or a financial trap?
[00:22:00] Introducing Eline Van Der Velden
[00:26:00] Why Tilly caused a nuclear reaction; every other digital human got a shrug; Tilly got an industry meltdown
[00:45:00] The IP and copyright question & Particle6's internal AI ethics policy
[00:57:00] AI is replacing the entire international dubbing workforce in real time
[00:59:30] The case for AI Animation image rehab & name change
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Recorded live from the AWE main stage in Long Beach, Charlie Fink and Ted Schilowitz are joined by three veterans of the XR industry for a wide-ranging conversation about where the industry has been and where it is actually headed.

Malia Probst, founder of Scout House and a decade-plus in creator and developer programs, Shelley Peterson, former head of XR at Lockheed Martin and now running her consultancy Wizard Wells, and Mary Matheson, head of production at Agog and a multi-award winning immersive documentary director, bring three distinct vantage points — enterprise, consumer, and social impact — to the same set of questions.

The result is one of the more honest conversations about the state of XR that the show has done.

The panel covers the Snap Spectacles launch happening steps away at the same conference, why $2,300 does not make something a consumer device no matter what the marketing says, and what Google Glass actually got right when nobody was paying attention. The group digs into Meta's slow pullback from the metaverse and whether losing the big-pocketed backer is a crisis or a correction. World models come up as the technology that may finally make immersive content creation accessible without years of game engine training. And the conversation lands on a question that cuts across all of it: is the AI backlash really about the technology, or is it about who owns it?

The closing question — what do we know now that we didn't know 10 years ago — produces the three best lines of the panel. Mary says the people behind XR are still here and that's what she couldn't have predicted. Malia says the only constant is change, and there has never been a better time to be a creator. Shelley says you are going to pivot whether you like it or not.

Key Moments:
[00:05:45] Snap Spectacles debut at AWE
[00:17:45] Meta's metaverse pullback
[00:22:00] Ted asks the uncomfortable question; the panel actually answers it.
[00:25:00] Enterprise as the real XR business
[00:32:40] The Google Glass parable
[00:40:15] Five years out — world models, quantum computing, AI on your body, and the race to be your 24/7 agent
[00:50:20] AI backlash
[00:57:53] What 10 years taught us — Mary, Malia, and Shelley each close with something worth writing down
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