Welcome back to our weekly roundup of happenings from XR and AI realms. Let’s dive in…
The Lede
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference next week will be the first under new CEO John Ternus, marking a leadership transition as the company shifts focus from hardware innovation to AI-driven software and services. New devices are unlikely, but Apple may preview future directions in wearables, smart home products, and foldable devices through developer tools and ecosystem updates. The centerpiece is expected to be a major overhaul of Siri. Apple is widely anticipated to introduce a more conversational, context-aware assistant powered by a combination of on-device AI and cloud-based models, reportedly including Google’s Gemini. The upgraded Siri is expected to handle multi-step tasks across iPhone, iPad, and Mac while maintaining Apple’s emphasis on privacy.
Feeling Spatial
US Orange, a newly formed Silicon Valley company founded by inventor Darwin Hu with backing from MAS Capital, announced it has engaged advisors and legal counsel to prepare for a potential Nasdaq IPO. The company says it is developing AI-powered XR glasses that will eventually leverage terahertz-based 6G communications, a technology still years from commercial deployment. While details about products, revenue, and customers remain limited, the filing reflects growing investor enthusiasm around AI wearables and smart glasses. Following Meta’s success with Ray-Ban and the emergence of Android XR, public market investors are beginning to view AI eyewear as a potentially significant new computing platform.
Acer has entered the smart glasses race with two distinct products aimed at different segments of the emerging wearable AI market. The Acer GI0 is an AI assistant powered by Google Gemini, offering voice control, image recognition, translation, note-taking, and content capture through an onboard camera and microphone. The higher-end AR Vision GR0 functions as a wearable display, projecting a virtual screen for entertainment, gaming, and productivity. Priced at $299 and $499, respectively, the glasses will arrive later this year. Acer’s move reflects a broader industry shift as Google, Samsung, Meta, Snap, and others compete to establish smart glasses as the next major consumer computing platform.
Meta has reversed course on one of its most successful – and difficult – VR acquisitions. Just months after halting new content development for Supernatural as part of broader Reality Labs cuts, the company is spinning the VR fitness service out into an independent business called Supernatural Health. The platform’s original founders (Chris Milk?) and coaches will lead the new company, and plans to resume content production later this year. Meta acquired Supernatural creator Within for a reported $400 million after a lengthy antitrust battle with the FTC, making the reversal particularly notable. The implosion of the Meta Metaverse is fragmenting into a broader Quest ecosystem.
Spatial exits the consumer market. Once one of the best-funded and most visible virtual world startups, Spatial, is shutting down its creator platform and deleting user-hosted worlds this summer after concluding that the economics of operating large-scale social 3D environments no longer work. The company says rising infrastructure costs made it impossible to sustain independent creators without imposing unsustainable fees. Spatial is pivoting toward game development through its in-house studio, Wooster Games, whose VR title Animal Company has become a hit on Quest.
Snap has acquired augmented reality startup Illumix as it accelerates development of its upcoming Specs smart glasses, expected to launch later this year. Illumix specializes in spatial computing, computer vision, and AR experiences that blend digital content with the physical world. Most of the company’s team will join Snap, where its technology will be integrated into the Specs platform. Financial terms were not disclosed, which suggests it was an all-stock acquisition. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel is all-in on the new Spectacles. We’ll hear more of that in his encore keynote at AWE on June 17th. Hardware is made of atoms, and hard to scale, even with Snap’s billion monthly users. Plus, rumors suggest a price of $2,500, which would make Spectacles closer in price to the Samsung Galaxy XR and the Vision Pro ($1,500 on eBay).
Huawei’s new AI Glasses may be emerging as China’s strongest challenger to Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. Following hands-on testing at Huawei’s R&D campus in Shenzhen, XR blogger Tony “SkarredGhost” Vitillo praised the device’s photo and video capabilities, citing AI-enhanced image processing, stabilization, tilt correction, and seamless integration with Huawei’s ecosystem. The glasses feature a 12MP camera, voice-activated AI assistant, live translation, and video streaming through WeChat, all packaged in a lightweight titanium frame. The catch is geographic and platform lock-in. The glasses are currently available only in China and require Huawei phones.
Virtuix, best known for its omnidirectional VR treadmills, has received Phase I funding from the U.S. Air Force’s AFWERX innovation program to develop an AI-powered military training platform called Virtual Terrain Walk. The system combines immersive XR environments, spatial computing, and AI-driven 3D terrain reconstruction, allowing warfighters to physically walk through digital replicas of real-world locations before deployment. Rather than studying maps or screens, teams can rehearse missions inside geo-specific virtual environments generated from camera footage in a matter of hours. The award reflects growing defense interest in spatial computing and simulation, where AI is increasingly being used to create realistic training environments, mission planning tools, and battlefield rehearsals.
The AI Desk
Microsoft Build took place this week. The company unveiled its first in-house AI models and an AI assistant whose internal goal, per leaked documents, is to “make people addicted.” Microsoft used the event to introduce a new phase in its AI strategy: less dependence on OpenAI and greater emphasis on its own models and products. The company unveiled a family of in-house AI systems like MAI-Thinking-1, a reasoning model, and a compact coding model that Microsoft claims rivals larger competitors on software engineering tasks. It also introduced new AI agents, cybersecurity tools, and an expanded Copilot platform. While the massive ten-billion-dollar cloud computing deal with OpenAI is still on, Microsoft made clear it planned to compete directly with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, rather than primarily serving as their infrastructure partner.
AI music startup Suno has raised another $400 million, more than doubling its valuation to $5.4 billion in just seven months despite ongoing copyright litigation from major record labels and criticism from artists over training data practices. Investors, led by Bond Capital, are betting that AI-generated music will become a major creative and commercial category, with Suno positioning itself as the leading platform. The funding comes as the music industry shifts from outright resistance toward licensing and partnership deals with AI companies.
Anthropic announced it was on the cusp of self-recursive – self-improving – AI. This has often been the very definition of Artificial General Intelligence, the point at which AI systems can help build increasingly capable successors with diminishing human involvement. In a new paper from the Anthropic Institute, the company argues the industry needs mechanisms to monitor AI-driven R&D and, if necessary, coordinate a temporary slowdown in development if capabilities begin advancing faster than society can safely manage. Anthropic notes that AI already plays a major role in software development, with Claude generating most of the code merged into the company’s codebase. The paper is notable because it moves a long theoretical debate about self improving AI from science fiction into the practical planning of one of the world’s leading AI labs.
Fox is taking Season 3 of its reality dating series Farmer Wants a Wife and re-editing it into 101 vertical episodes, each under two minutes long, for distribution on Holywater’s My Drama app. Rather than producing new content, Fox is experimenting with format, restructuring eleven broadcast episodes into a mobile-first binge experience built around cliffhangers, romance, and emotional stakes. The project reflects growing interest in short-form vertical storytelling, which has become a multibillion-dollar category dominated by apps like ReelShort, DramaBox, and My Drama. In my view, this announcement is bigger than that. We may look back on this as the inflection point where the production of video content fully shifts away from advertising to a Direct-to-Consumer model.
Google Labs has launched Dreambeans, an experimental AI app that turns data from Gmail, Calendar, Photos, YouTube, and Search into a finite daily collection of personalized stories and recommendations. Rather than encouraging endless scrolling, Dreambeans aims to surface places to visit, events to attend, topics to explore, and other contextually relevant suggestions based on a user’s interests and activity. The app uses Google’s Personal Intelligence framework and can generate custom illustrations featuring users, friends, family members, and even pets. It’s only available to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. I’m seriously considering it. It comes with YouTube Premium, which millions of people play for anyway. Do you think Siri can do this?
Cinematic Corner
One of the first major Hollywood pushbacks against generative AI arrived from inside the creative community itself. Jorge Gutierrez, the acclaimed creator of The Book of Life and Maya and the Three, has withdrawn from Amazon MGM’s new AI animation initiative following backlash from artists and fans. Gutierrez had planned to develop Punky Duck, one of several series created with Amazon’s Project Nara AI production platform, but publicly apologized and exited the project, saying he would not move forward. Technology is advancing rapidly, but industry acceptance remains far from settled. But there is more to it. People don’t like the way AI is being forced on them. They don’t trust it and the oligarchs who control it. They do not trust the government and institutions to defend them. The notable concentration of capital, their thirst for electricity, and power, engenders anger. We didn’t vote for this. And that makes people mad about AI anything.
Martin Scorsese has become one of the highest profile filmmakers to publicly embrace generative AI, joining image generation startup Black Forest Labs as an adviser and investor. The director says he is using the company’s FLUX model to create storyboards during preproduction, helping him communicate visual ideas to cast and crew more quickly and clearly. Scorsese emphasized that AI is a creative tool rather than a replacement for writers, actors, or artists, but the announcement sparked immediate backlash from storyboard and concept artists who argue such systems are trained on creative work without consent. Is that really the issue? Because the courts say it is not. This is settled. Maybe people are mad about something else.
Kavan the Kid is working with Magnific to create a feature film, Chronicles of Bone, one fifteen minute episode at the time. Start at the beginning, or jump into the latest episode, for a post-apocalyptic Game of Thrones influenced mash-up of Arthurian legends, vampires, and iconic childhood stories like Robin Hood, Peter Pan, and vampires.
Spatial Audio
This column has a companion, the AI/XR Podcast, hosted by its author, Charlie Fink; Ted Schilowitz, former studio executive and futurist for Paramount and Fox; and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap and Synthbee AI.
Our latest episode featured Jonathan Rodriguez Cefalu, CEO of Preamble AI (see episode below). Our next guest is Augmented World Expo co-founder and CEO Ori Inbar. He’ll be sharing a preview of the show, which begins in Long Beach, CA, on June 15th. Episodes drop on Tuesdays, and you can find them on podcasting platforms Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.
Charlie Fink is the producer and co-host of the AIXR Podcast and teaches at Chapman University and ASU. Fink is the producer of the vertical gen AI social media series, “Linda’s Last Podcast” (2026) and serves as CEO of Cinemation.AI, an AI animation studio he co-founded with film director Rob Minkoff, whose vertical anime series, Speed Queen, is in pre-production. He is the author of the critically acclaimed AR-enabled books Charlie Fink’s Metaverse (2017), Convergence, Or How the World Will Be Painted With Data (2019), and the upcoming AI, The End of Hollywood, and What Comes Next.