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
Wearable AI Arrives As Meta Upgrades Its AI Assistant App. The app, designed to compete with ChatGPT, offers standard AI features like text and voice interaction, image generation, and web search but, now, for the first time, it will have geolocation. In other words, when you ask Meta AI a question, it knows where you are and what you are looking at. Using information about your interests, location, profile, and activity allows Meta AI to respond to up-to-the-second contextual information. This has never been possible before. The app will also handle real-time translation. This a game-changer for AI on Ray-Bans which suddenly became a lot more useful. I’m going to wear them all the time now. As with everything Meta does there are concerns about privacy and other negative consequences.
Feeling Spatial
MixRift has launched Battle Orb, a fast-paced mixed reality strategy game where players go head-to-head in immersive arenas that blend physical and digital play. Featuring 1v1 and 2v2 competitive modes, players aim, shoot, and outmaneuver each other using physics-based tactics to climb the global leaderboard.
Fortnite is back on the iPhone. After a five-year standoff, Epic Games is relaunching the game on iOS, citing a federal court ruling that Apple violated an injunction by restricting links to alternative payment options. The ruling weakens Apple’s grip on in-app transactions and opens the door for developers like Epic to bypass the App Store’s 30 percent cut. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said Fortnite will be available again in the U.S. App Store this week. But this is more than a game. Fortnite is Epic’s metaverse platform, home to concerts, branded content, and a creator economy. Returning to iOS expands that reach just as Epic doubles down on making Fortnite a hub for games, social connection, and user-generated content. The metaverse didn’t die, it just moved to where the users are.
Beats & Bites
- Forget Vision Pro: Apple is going all in on smart glasses with custom chips
- Meta’s new AI glasses could have a ‘super-sensing’ mode with facial recognition
- PICO Opens Doors to More XR Innovation for Enterprise and Developers
- Meta announces a big change to its Quest 3 game subscription
- This VR experience opened my eyes to the future of creativity
- Here’s What I Learned After Six Months of Wearing Ray-Ban Metas
- Google I/O 2025: What to expect with Gemini, Android 16, and Project Astra
- XR Immersive Workspaces: The Power of Haptic Feedback and User Tracking
- I tested the best AR and MR glasses: Here’s how the Meta Ray-Bans stack up
- The Dream of the Metaverse Is Dying. Manufacturing Is Keeping It Alive
- ‘Minecraft’ Officially Drops VR Support, But There Are Still a Few Ways to Play
- ArborXR Expands VR Training Analytics Capabilities with InformXR Acquisition
- Half the Size & Half the Price is What Vision Pro Needs to Take Off
- Pinterest updates visual search with more AI-powered features
The AI Desk
Netflix adds a TikTok-style vertical video feed to its homepage. This is such a good idea. The company faces an existential threat from its scrolling competitors, to whom it has been losing the war for attention since 2022. The new Netflix scroll, which will also be on the Netflix app, will showcase trailers, clips from films and series, behind-the-scenes content, games, and fan content. It could be a testing ground for new ideas and talent. Every streamer should immediately copy this. AI search has also been added to Netflix search. That might be a headline on another day, but it’s the AI understanding of your behavior that makes the scroll so addictive.
Tariff on foreign films is an exercise of raw power over media and culture. If enacted, it will accelerate the shift to AI and virtual production. The President has since walked back his threats to place tariffs on an industry with a 300% trade surplus. You can never be sure if he’s trolling, or if he sees an irresistible opportunity to control culture. Probably both. Here’s what would follow an imposition of tariffs to the entertainment industry: (1) Reciprocal tariffs on US products will help foreign competitors, who have been fruitlessly fighting an onslaught of US films and series for a century. (2) There are many nuances about what constitutes “foreign.” What if the film is a co-production? Who decides? (3) The commerce department would need some kind of assessor to carry out the President’s order. Therefore, each film and series will have to be audited and a tax paid before its release. (4) This will accelerate the transition to AI and virtual production. Teams for AI films will be smaller, distributed and remote. (5) The liberal multicultural entertainment industry is a frequent target of Trump and his supporters. Blows against them earn cheers from MAGA world. (6) In the end, it’s about the art of the deal. Producers, studios, and streamers need to get in line behind big tech and start buying some Trump coin. Even then, it might not help you. Just ask Google and Meta.
Mark Zuckerberg thinks AI companions could supplement human relationships. In a recent Axios interview, he described a future where Meta’s chatbot becomes part of a user’s social life, integrated across phones, smart glasses, and eventually wrist-worn devices. The new Meta AI app already allows users interact with AI characters and share conversations with others. Zuckerberg says this could help address the loneliness epidemic. Critics are skeptical. The bots collect personal data, and Meta does not guarantee that conversations are excluded from model training.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink is reportedly seeking to raise $500 million at a pre-money valuation of $8.5 billion. This would more than double its last known valuation of $3.5 billion in late 2023. The funding round, still in early discussions, could push Neuralink’s post-money valuation to around $9 billion. Neuralink has been conducting human trials, and early results show participants can control digital devices using only their thoughts.
People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies (Miles Klee/Rolling Stone)
The first two stories in my series about the changes in Hollywood wrought by new technologies, rising costs, and lower viewership: AI and Hollywood’s Next Golden Age and Hollywood is Losing The War for Attention are now live.
Spatial Audio
For more spatial commentary & insights, check out the AI/XR Podcast, hosted by the author of this column, Charlie Fink, Paramount futurist and co-founder of Red Camera, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap, Mako Robotics, and Synthbee AI. This week’s guests are Tye Sheridan and Nikola Todovic of Wonder Dynamics AI. 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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