Welcome back to Spatial Beats, where we round up all the top news and happenings from around the spatial computing spectrum, including its escalating infusions with AI and other emerging tech. Let’s dive in…

The Lede

Apple reportedly stops developing AR smart glasses. It will continue to support its $3500 Vision Pro, introduced just a year ago. Apple is banking on Vision Pro gaining traction with enterprises, having apparently forgotten the sad fate of Microsoft’s HoloLens. Having fallen grievously behind on AI with its shockingly lame once and future agent, Siri, Apple continues to spend billions on exactly the wrong things, forfeiting the wearable AI market to Meta, and betting on enterprise MR. Don’t sell your Apple stock yet, though. The great thing about being the biggest tech company in the world, with a market cap of $3.55 Billion, is that when Siri is finally the cheerful and useful assistant promised in 2012, it will kick every other AI off of the iPhone and we will spend all our waking hours with it inside the Apple ecosystem.

Feeling Spatial

To its credit, Meta seems to finally grok that Mixed Reality has become a mixed reality for them. Their one bright spot, the AI-enabled Meta Ray Ban audio smart glasses, ate $100 M in marketing on its way to Super Bowl Sunday. They sold a million Ray Bans in Q4. If so, it cost Meta $100 in marketing dollars per unit sold. This is the success story. It should be no surprise, therefore, that in a supposedly ‘leaked’ email sent to Reality Labs employees by Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, 2025 is a “make or break year” for the division. That sounds a lot like “the year of Efficiency,” which saw mass layoffs at the company. He singled out Meta’s disastrous metaverse venture, Horizon, which has evolved into a weak Roblox competitor. Their AR/VR Reality Labs division earned a record $1 B revenue Q4, but it still lost $4.4 B that same quarter. Reality Labs’ total losses for the last 12-month period are $17.7 B. Even though Meta has invested nearly one hundred billion dollars (not a typo) in their misguided metaverse, they could, and maybe should, walk away. $100 B is just 5.7% of Meta’s $1.76 trillion market cap today. The stock would probably go up on the announcement.

https://youtu.be/KNKSLbau0j0

Zynga has launched “The Dragon Egg Hunt,” a global treasure hunt within its puzzle RPG, Game of Thrones: Legends, powered by Google Maps. Participants navigate a 2D map inspired by the show’s opening credits, utilizing Google’s Photorealistic 3D Tiles to search for virtual dragon eggs at key locations worldwide. The event offers surprises like incentivized codes and in-game rewards. Players collectively work to unlock milestone rewards and can win prizes, including a Google Pixel 9 Pro and Google Play gift cards. Sweepstakes run until February 24, 2025.

https://youtu.be/0DETPApIeok

The US Is The World Leader in Spatial XR Teach, Let’s Keep It That Way (Cathy Hackl/Forbes)

Beats & Bites

The AI Desk

Hello, Siri. It’s me, Alexa. With OpenAI, Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Grok sucking the AI air out of the room, it’s easy to forget about Amazon’s multibillion-dollar investment in Anthropic. Now Amazon is preparing to launch an AI-powered upgrade to its voice assistant, Alexa, marking its most significant enhancement in over a decade. The new Alexa engages in multi-turn dialogues, remembers user preferences, and can work autonomously as your agent. Amazon’s seemingly forgotten ‘Alexa everywhere’ strategy has new relevance as AI agents begin to infiltrate our daily lives. The service will initially be free for Prime members, but Amazon hopes to eventually charge $5 to $10 per month. An event is scheduled for February 26 to showcase the new features.

Google is offering “voluntary” buyouts to hardware and platform employees ahead of expected cuts. The “Platform and Devices” unit includes more than 25,000 full-time employees who work on Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, Google Photos, Google One, Pixel, Fitbit, and Nest, according to internal documents we viewed. The buyouts are a signal of expected cuts within Google as it continues prioritizing and utilizing artificial intelligence. A skilled software developer, augmented with AI, can do the work of two or three people. If AI hasn’t made you a better, more productive coder, a voluntary buyout might be attractive.

Riffusion, a San Francisco-based AI startup, has launched a free web platform enabling users to create original music using their AI model, Fuzz. Fuzz generates complete songs from text descriptions, audio clips, or visual prompts and learns individual users’ musical preferences over time. This release comes as major tech companies like Google, Meta, and TikTok explore similar AI-driven audio synthesis technologies. Notably, Alex Pall of The Chainsmokers has joined Riffusion’s advisory board, highlighting the platform’s potential in the music industry. Riffusion’s approach positions AI as a collaborative tool for both professional musicians and casual enthusiasts, offering an intuitive interface without subscription fees. Riffusion, an AI-driven music generation startup, secured $4 million in seed funding on October 17, 2023. Greycroft led the investment round, with participation from South Park Commons and Sky9 Capital. The company plans to use the funds to enhance its AI capabilities, expand its music library, and improve user experience.

https://youtu.be/I3W1IydJ_LQ

OpenAI’s Sora Filmmaking Tool Meets Resistance in Hollywood. Bloomberg reports the studios and OpenAI have not settled on a deal framework that would work for both sides financially and address concerns about the use of artificial intelligence, which was an important issue in two labor strikes that paralyzed Hollywood in 2023. Directors who have worked with Sora say it’s difficult to control, and far from ready for a commercial role.

Naturally, the creator of this exceptional music video for exiled Turkish rapper Ezhel, Öner S. Biberkökü, is a director. He made the film by himself in six weeks. It cost $2,800 in AI generation fees. “Using the possibilities of AI,” Biberkökü said in an email, “I created an official music video for Ezhel from the country he deeply misses—without ever meeting him in person. He loved the video and it became his official music video.”

https://youtu.be/z5eSot0pcz0

Sebastian Ungrad, an art director at Munich’s Storybook Studios, a renowned AI production company, made “Recursion” while on vacation. “I read the incredible book, , by Blake Crouch and felt inspired to create a trailer for a TV series adaptation that doesn’t exist (yet)! All images are animated with MiniMax. Images: FLUX & Midjourney. Voice (Speech-to-Speech): ElevenLabs. Lip-Sync: Runway ActOne. Music by: John Utah – Run for the Man, M83 – Solitude (Felsmann + Tiley Reinterpretation).

https://youtu.be/4FOsnfOSoo8

Native Foreign partner Nick Cleverov directed this co-production with TCL studios and was selected as a Finalist in Project Odyssey’s Narrative Competition. “The story is based on an idea I had a long time ago about a future where artists paint human memories to make androids feel alive,” Cleverov wrote on Linkedin. About a dozen people worked on the project which was made with a mix of generative AI, voice talent, and a new post pipeline. “The gatekeeping that once made filmmaking an exclusive endeavor is eroding, allowing more creatives to explore their visions in a meaningful way,” he said.

Spatial Audio

For more spatial commentary & insights, check out the AI/XR Podcast, hosted by the author of this column, Charlie Fink, Ted Schilowitz, former studio executive and co-founder of Red Camera, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week our guest is Sean Mann, CEO of RP1. You can find it on podcasting platforms Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.

Charlie Fink is an author and futurist focused on spatial computing. See his books here. Spatial Beats contains insights and inputs from Fink’s collaborators including Paramount Pictures futurist Ted Shilowitz.

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