How Quilty Is Opening Hollywood's Gates ft. Simon Horsman & Daniel Wood, Quilty.app

The AI XR Podcast.

The episode explores recent breakthroughs in XR and AI, beginning with a review of Meta Connect's hardware announcements and the rapid rise

Key takeaways

• Meta's recent Connect event signaled a shift from defensive posture to confidence in the smart glasses market.
• Meta is targeting Apple Vision Pro users with lightweight, occluded VR glasses that utilize an external computing puck.

Main topics

• Meta Connect announcements
• Apple Vision Pro vs. Meta hardware

Notable quotes

The entertainment business has always been the technology business.

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates that while AI presents ethical challenges in

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) Our This Week in XR podcast is sponsored by our friends at Zapper, the world's leading augmented reality platform and creative studio. With over 11 years of experience working with the world's biggest brands through Zapper Creative Studio. Zapper also has an award-winning web AR platform, ZapWorks, that lets you create your own mobile AR magic. Finally, check out their Zap Box, the most affordable mixed reality headset on the planet. Start creating AR over at zap.works or talk to them about your next AR project at zapper.com. I'm Charlie Fink with the AIXR podcast. Today I have a special guest co-host, Courtney Harding, the founder of Friends of Holograms, and she is also a friend of ours, was on the show a couple of weeks ago. And we have a lot to talk about this morning, so I'm glad you can join us. Welcome, Courtney. Speaker 1 (0:52) Yeah, thanks for emailing me in the middle of the night. Speaker 4 (0:56) Yes, I was perhaps in a little bit of a panic and emailed all my friends, but it's turned out just fine. It's, you know, with three co-hosts, this almost never happens. But when you're in a jam, it's always great to have someone who's super interesting and knowledgeable to come bail you out. So I really, really appreciate it. You know the format, right? We're going to go over the news for 20 minutes and have some opinions about it. And then we're going to bring in our guests from Quilty.app. They are Simon Horstman and Daniel Wood, the co-founders. I hope I got that right. Let's jump right on the news. So obviously, MetaConnect, big deal this week. They had a lot of interesting announcements. Were you there, Courtney? Speaker 1 (1:45) I couldn't go in person this year. I had a conflict, but I watched the live stream and I have many thoughts. Speaker 4 (1:52) Well, one more thing. Yeah, what? Come on, bring it on. I can't wait to hear what your thoughts are on this. Speaker 1 (2:00) So. Speaker 1 (2:02) The big picture for me, setting aside the devices and Muse and everything, is, and this is going to sound a little strange, but go with it. Vibrationally, it felt very good. I was there in 2024 when Zuck had the, whatever, Latin, like, Zuck or nothing shirt. And that felt like a very defensive posture. Speaker 3 (2:20) I Speaker 1 (2:20) think last year, 2025, was also very defensive. And of course, there were so many glitches and tech mistakes and the demo's working. And that, I think, threw everything off. This year. And I've talked to a lot of folks, friends of mine who were there. The vibes were impeccable. I think meta now feels very confident going forward. I think they really are going to... The smart glasses market is theirs to lose at this point, which is not to say there aren't other amazing players who could very much come in and take a piece of the pie, but I think they are the furthest ahead with that. I think Muse really has gone from like zero to 60 and... The interesting thing for me about Muse is it is capturing audiences that are sort of sure to for uncaptured because of the reach that Facebook has and also the pendant, which is interesting. So, yeah, everyone I've spoken to who was there said it was a great event. And I think everything else aside, like all the devices all seem really good. But beyond that, I think they seem more confident and better positioned to really do more stuff. Speaker 4 (3:26) For those of you who have not been following the news closely, Meta had several big announcements at their annual developer event. The first is, of course, they announced a new VR headset. It's not exactly a headset. It's a little bit of a different approach. They're more like glasses, but it is fully... occluded VR experience, and they've offloaded a lot of the weight in the headset, which continues to be an issue for almost everyone, onto a puck, which once upon a time we ridiculed, but now seems like the choice du jour for people making headsets, specifically ones as sophisticated as these. They seem to be going after Apple's Vision Pro, which has not been a resounding success, and not just because of its price. So I'm interested in what they may be thinking about this particular application. The other things they announced, the little device that would run, I guess it's a... Tamaguchi, it's called. It hangs from your keychain. Muse AI is interesting. It's been exploding. It's number one in all the app stores. This is Meta's free AI. So most people use the free version of OpenAI or Gemini. And this is Meta's version. It's quite good, I thought. I've been using it. It's not remarkably better than... Gemini or OpenAI, but it also seems to be quite their equal. So that in itself is impressive. And obviously their paid layer, be interesting to see how much more that offers. And then finally, yeah, they finally came out with a pair of Ray-Bans that don't have cameras in them. I've said all along, of course. The camera does not need to be in the glasses. It could be on your lapel or as Apple is thinking, maybe on your earbuds because it's there for spatial understanding, not taking pictures. And that's the thing, of course, that most people in the public don't understand, that most of the time no one uses those glasses. You've got it tethered to your smartphone, which has a camera, which is much better and more versatile than you'll ever have on your face. So unless you're doing action sports or something like that, I don't know that. the glasses are a great option for taking pictures, but they're widely misunderstood. So Beta, rather than trying to explain all that, has just gone and made a pair without glasses to get rid of the confusion. Of course, now that the glasses have used the geolocation or their AI can use the geolocation feature using the camera then becomes even more superfluous because heretofore you had to use the camera. to take a still photo, to query AI about where you are. But now it's a continuous feed, which is really what it wants to be because it's a sensor. It's not a camera. A camera, you know, is on for a fraction of a second. A sensor is always on. Anyway, interesting distinction not to go down a Professor Charlie rabbit hole there. It was a pretty productive, I thought, MetaConnect. really was kind of surprised. As you said, last year was kind of a bust. The demo didn't work. The use case he was trying to demo was not terribly good. And it just seemed like... They had run out of gas and run out of ideas. So they're back and they do have some ideas. And so I'll be interested in some of your thoughts on those ideas, specifically going after the Apple Vision Pro. What are they thinking? There's not that much content out there for the Vision Pro. Speaker 1 (7:05) And that's been the reason the Vision Pro has not done well. I mean, it's a great device. Like I have one sitting right here next to me and it's heavy, sure. And it's imperfect. But it is a very, very good device. But where Apple really fell short was producing enough content for it. So I joke that I have done every experience on the Vision Pro, and that's not hard to do. Speaker 4 (7:26) I Speaker 1 (7:27) had a call with Apple last summer, and I told them as much. They did not support a creator ecosystem as much as they should have, and look where it got them. Meta, and I say this as someone who has worked there and someone who's dealt with them quite a bit, Meta is... inconsistent when it comes to supporting creators. They tend to change strategies very often, and that causes a lot of frustration. But I think if Meta can, again, get in with more creators, get in with more content, that's the path to success for them. I think also the enterprise use cases for the new headset, as opposed to the Quests or the other headsets that are in market, are much clearer, right? This is a much lighter headset, much easier to use headset than even the Quest, which is a great headset. pretty bulky. And so I think, again, moving forward, and I focus on enterprise primarily, the enterprise use cases for that headset will be really amazing. So if Meta can support the creators to get stuff off the ground, which hopefully they will, then I think they're very well positioned. The headset that no one talks about, though, is the Google headset, which is actually similar in price point to the Meta headset. It's a little bit more expensive, a couple hundred bucks. But that headset, You know, it appeared and then it disappeared. And I don't know what Google is doing broadly in the category anymore, but with that headset. And so I don't know where that's going to fit into this picture, if at all. Speaker 4 (8:50) Google seems to be more focused on AR and Project Dora, which they're doing with XREAL. Speaker 1 (8:57) They Speaker 4 (8:57) don't seem to be doing a lot independent of that, although they have the option to if they want to, obviously. So we had a bunch of other news. Let's try and bang through that in the next 10 minutes before we get to our guests. One more thing, though, I would say about the... the Meta VR glasses. I guess Meta said they're viewing, and this is because you mentioned enterprise, I wanted to bring it up, because they're viewing the two use cases for this device as being very specific. One is productivity, the other is media consumption. Speaker 4 (9:36) So, and I think productivity is sort of an area where the Vision Pro, despite some of its ergonomic challenges, is getting some traction. Speaker 1 (9:44) Yeah. Yeah. And I think if you make it a work device, then I think they Speaker 4 (9:49) will Speaker 1 (9:50) be very successful. And looking at, when I use the term enterprise, I use that very, very broadly. So enterprise could be your traditional, like using it to fix a machine on a factory floor. Or it could be I put this on at my desk and it doubles my screen and I can use my avatar on a conference call as opposed to having to like, you know, this morning I woke up and I like dried my hair and I put on some lipstick because I knew I was going to be on camera with you. Speaker 3 (10:13) Right. I Speaker 1 (10:14) think if you marketed it to women in particular that way, you'd see a huge increase in sales. Yeah. Well, Speaker 4 (10:19) I think the design of it as certainly not just the lightweight, but the fact that you are not. sort of trapped in a black box while you're doing it is certainly going to make it a lot more accessible to a lot more people who might have otherwise balked at putting on a big, heavy, sweaty thing. Speaker 1 (10:37) So Speaker 4 (10:37) it can only be positive if they have, as you said, enough content. I don't think it's overpriced for what they're offering. Speaker 1 (10:45) Yeah, Speaker 4 (10:46) I Speaker 1 (10:46) think it's a great price. So Speaker 4 (10:47) another big event, now getting to the subject change, Disney... hired the CEO of Character AI to be its first company-wide CTO. So he's in charge of all the technology for all the divisions of the Disney company, and they expect other team members from Character AI to be joining him. This is really interesting because, as you may recall, two years ago, a number of Character AI founders ended up being... employed in kind of an aqua hire, if you will, at Google. So this was the guy who was brought in, another former Google guy, to run Character AI after they left. And now he's leaving for Disney. So I don't know what it is about Character AI, but it seems to be a very good training ground for senior executives. Any insight on what might be going on there? Speaker 1 (11:47) You know, I don't know too much about what it's like to work with character AI, although it sounds fantastic, right, if you're churning out these folks constantly. The thing with Disney to me is, you know, they seem to be looking for their footing in this new sort of media environment. You know, they did that big splashy deal with OpenAI and Sora that... It never actually got done. It was announced that they were working on it. And then when Sora died, it kind of went away. So I think Disney and not just Disney, all these big media companies are really just trying to figure out, OK, how do we succeed in this new world? And so I think, yeah, making a hire like that is smart and strategic. But we'll see. We'll see what happens and how much, you know. leverage this person has, how much freedom they have? Is this sort of a PR hire where they pay someone a bunch of money? Or is this actually going to create fundamental change in an organization with a lot of history? Speaker 4 (12:42) I don't know if you remember three years ago. During the metaverse craze or in the waning days, I should say, of the metaverse craze, Disney had announced that it was going to create a metaverse group and build a Disney metaverse. And within six months, they changed course. Oh, Speaker 3 (12:58) sure. Speaker 4 (12:59) And they said they were investing a billion and a half dollars in Epic Games and that Epic Games was going to build the Disney metaverse. And of course, we haven't seen or heard anything. Since then, a billion and a half dollars is a lot of money. It must be a real project there somewhere. I think it's smart for Disney to partner with Epic. Disney has never been very good at video games, and that's all that Epic does. But we haven't heard much about that. It was similar in scale to the OpenAI deal with Sora that didn't happen. For those of you who don't remember, don't know what we're talking about, last year Disney made a... deal with Sora. They were going to create a, I don't know, website, a place where you could create content using Sora and Disney IP. They weren't going to give you the creme de la creme. You won't be able to use Snow White, but they were going to put in Stormtroopers and all sorts of other lovable secondary characters from all the different universes of TV and movie characters. But again, as you said, when... OpenAI decided to shut down Sora, which was their video generation tool. They backed out of the Disney, Disney backed out of that deal. So they did invest in OpenAI. But like I said, we're still