The AI XR Podcast

Shelly Palmer has spent 45 years watching technology reshape every industry—from writing news themes for CBS to consulting with every major media company on AI strategy.

On this year-end recap, he cuts through the noise with one devastating observation: 2025 was the year everyone talked about AI while almost nobody actually used it. Executives shook their heads knowingly in meetings, pontificated about capabilities the mod...

Caitlin Krause, author of Digital Wellbeing, argues that intentional design unlocks genuine connection within virtual spaces. Drawing on her teaching at Stanford and the University of Oregon, she's explored how XR environments can foster asynchronous connection and ambient awareness for people who crave belonging without hyper-social performance. Her framework rejects the "digital detox" model entirely—instead advocating f...

In this special live episode recorded at SynthBee headquarters in South Florida, hosts Charlie Fink, Ted Schilowitz, and Rony Abovitz bring listeners inside a special gathering of neuroscientists, philosophers, and technologists debating the future of AI. Moving beyond hype, the conversation focuses on "Collaborative Intelligence" vs. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), exploring whether we...

Vince Kadlubek, co-founder of Meow Wolf, joins Charlie and Ted for a deep dive into the future of immersive entertainment, arguing that in an age of infinite AI-generated digital content, "physical reality is the only place novelty still exists." From Meow Wolf’s origins as a scrappy art collective dumpster-diving for materials in Santa Fe to becoming a global location-based entertainment juggernaut with new sites planned ...

David Jiang, CEO of VITURE, joins Charlie, Ted, and Rony for a special Black Friday episode to discuss the breakout year for "display glasses" and why his company is betting on gamers, not just enterprise, to drive mass adoption. With VITURE now hitting shelves at Best Buy and flashing on billboards along Silicon Valley’s Highway 101, Jiang reveals the data behind the device’s surprising "stickiness"—average daily users ar...

Kent Bye—host of the Voices of VR podcast and one of XR's most prolific journalists with over 1,680 published interviews—joins Charlie and Ted for a wide ranging conversation on the state of immersive storytelling, the ethics of AI, and why XR's future might be less about consumer headsets and more about embodied presence and human connection. Kent's decade-long commitment to documenting artists, creators, and developers a...

Neal Stephenson—legendary sci-fi author who coined "metaverse" in his 1992 novel Snow Crash—and Rebecca Barkin, co-founder of Lamina1, return to the AI XR Podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about building a decentralized creator economy, launching their dystopian AI world-building project Artifact, and why blockchain might finally free creators from Big Tech's chokehold.

Joined by Charlie, Ted, and Rony, the discu...

Dr. Tom Furness—esteemed as the “Grandfather of VR”—brings seven decades of breakthrough invention, untold stories, and rare wisdom to the AI XR Podcast. In this episode, Tom traces the thread from making rocket fuel as a kid in North Carolina to pioneering the “Super Cockpit” for the Air Force, founding the HIT Lab, and launching 27+ spatial computing startups. His journey reminds us that big shifts in XR and AI are reall...

Kirin Sinha, MIT math prodigy and founder/CEO of Illumix, embodies the vital intersection of AI, XR, and real-world relevance. On this episode, she unpacks the hard realities of spatial computing’s journey—from grinding through MIT at sixteen and “building the Iron Man desk as a senior project” to launching Five Nights at Freddy’s AR (garnering 60M+ downloads) and powering Disney/Six Flags location-based XR.

Sinha challenge...

Paul Raphaël , co-founder of Felix & Paul Studios, joins the AI XR Podcast for a candid, high-energy discussion on the state and future of immersive experiences. Broadcasting live from Las Vegas during the launch of "Interstellar Arc" at AREA15, Raphael details the three-year journey behind this ambitious location-based VR attraction—capable of hosting 170 simultaneous users in a fully interactive, physically-anchored ...

Amit Jain, CEO and founder of Luma AI, joins Charlie Fink, Ted Schilowitz, and Rony Abovitz to unpack the future of AI-native video and the transformation of Hollywood’s creative economy. Once an Apple engineer, Jain launched Luma during the early NeRF boom and built what is now the industry’s best-performing AI video generation system—Luma Ray 3, the world’s first HDR model capable of 16-bit cinematic compositing. In this...

Antony “Skarred Ghost” Vitillo—legendary XR blogger, developer, and authentic voice of the immersive tech world—joins Charlie Fink, Ted Schilowitz, and Rony Abovitz for a sharp, candid take on why spatial computing keeps breaking hearts (and bank accounts). 

Vitillo, calling in from Torino (and Nutella country), takes listeners inside his evolution from reluctant Twitter handle-user to one of the industry’s essential cr...

Paul Travers, founder and CEO of Vuzix Corporation, returns to join hosts Charlie Fink, Ted Schilowitz, and Rony Abovitz for a masterclass in enterprise XR resilience and the long game of hardware innovation. As the architect behind the world's first consumer VR headset (the VFX1 in 1992), Travers has survived every boom and bust cycle in wearable technology for over three decades. Now publicly traded with 80,000 sharehold...

Tricia Biggio, CEO of Invisible Universe, joins hosts Charlie Fink and Ted Schilowitz for an illuminating deep-dive into how AI is revolutionizing content creation for social media. A veteran television producer who transitioned from traditional media to Snap, then launched her own company, Biggio reveals how her team built the world's first AI-powered content creation platform that reduces production costs by 95% per minu...

Charlie is back from the Venice Film Festival Immersive, where he also judged the Reply AI Film Festival. His standout was Blur, which he shared with Ted and Rony, though the Grand Prize went to The Clouds Are 2000 Meters Up. He also praised Doug Liman’s Asteroid on Samsung’s Moohan headset and noted growing work on Apple Vision Pro.

In the news: Anthropic raised $13B at a $183B valuation, Replit secured $250M, Viture r...

On this week’s AIXR podcast, Ted Schilowitz and Rony Abovitz sit down with Jason Zada and Monica Monique of Secret Level, an AI-native production studio behind projects for Coca-Cola, Mercedes, and Will.i.am. The conversation explores the rapid changes in technology and storytelling, from Jason’s TED Talk experiment about a beaver and a magic sock, to the future of production where small creative teams can achieve what onc...

Charlie Fink hosts a special episode of the AIXR podcast with Rokid and CaringKind to discuss the launch of Rokid Glass, lightweight AI smart glasses. The conversation centers on how the device supports people with vision loss, dementia, and other disabilities through features like navigation, memory support, and safety monitoring, while also addressing privacy safeguards. Rokid announced a successful Kickstarter launch ($...

In this episode, recorded Friday, August 30, at the Venice Film Festival, Charlie Fink talks with director Doug Liman and the 30 Ninjas team, Juliana Tatlock and Jed Weintraub, about Asteroid, their new immersive XR film. The conversation covers the creative and technical process behind putting audiences inside a Hollywood movie, including the use of Google’s high-end digital human capture, Unreal Engine, and the Android X...

This week on The AI/XR Podcast, Charlie Fink, Ted Schilowitz, and Rony Abovitz start with the latest news but quickly veer into bigger questions about where technology, storytelling, and human behavior collide. What begins as a conversation about tools and platforms spirals—in a good way—into riffs on consciousness, creativity, and what it means to live in a mediated world. It’s part debate, part improv, and occasionally a...