Spatial Realities

Is Meta serious about confidential VMs for Muse?
Is Charm targeted at kids?
Are Meta VR Glasses the best VR glasses yet?
In this episode Thomas and Thomas are discussing Meta Connect revelations of 2026!

PARTNER OF THE EPISODE: https://immersive-x.de

Five years after the metaverse hype, we find ourselves in an era defined by smart glasses and compute pucks. That is the central takeaway from this Meta Connect special of Spatial Realities, where Thomas Bedenk and I sat down right after the keynote to analyze Meta’s latest announcements and what they mean for the XR landscape. The clear centerpiece of Meta's strategy is AI, spearheaded by Meta Muse—an autonomous agent running in private virtual machines designed to plan, purchase, and manage everyday digital life. Alongside Muse came an unexpected hardware companion: the Muse Charm. Shaped like a Tamagotchi with a display, camera, and 5G connectivity, it strips the assistant down into a standalone, approachable physical token. But while it feels accessible, it also raises immediate questions about target audiences, privacy boundaries, and how comfortable we truly are handing over our digital routines to an AI ecosystem. On the glasses front, Meta expanded its hardware lineup across multiple tiers. Most notable is the move into pure audio glasses without cameras, trading optical data capture for privacy-conscious users, lighter weight, and extended battery life. Meanwhile, the flagship Ray-Ban Meta line received a Gen 3 upgrade featuring slimmer frames, improved battery life, six microphones, and Dolby Atmos spatial audio capture, accompanied by new frame styles and software-driven hearing corrections. The most discussed hardware of the night, however, was the new Meta VR glasses. Positioned with the tri-part marketing pitch "cinema, computer, console," the device weighs roughly 100 grams on the face by offloading its processing and battery into a wired pocket puck. With micro-OLED displays running at 120 Hz, downward-facing cameras for hand tracking, and integrated eye tracking, Meta aims to deliver a high-clarity spatial viewer rather than an ultra-wide FOV headset. It serves as a spiritual successor to the Quest Pro line, sacrificing peripheral immersion for portability, high PPD sharpness, and lighter wear. At $1,299, the VR glasses mark a distinct shift toward portable media consumption and lightweight computing. Yet, as we examine in our discussion, Meta’s recurring bottleneck remains unchanged: while hardware form factors are shrinking into practical devices, the ecosystem still lacks dedicated, mature productivity software to turn spatial computing into an indispensable everyday tool.

IFA BERLIN RECAP

In this Episode Thomas Riedel and Thomas Bedenk share their takeaways from IFA Berlin, balancing stage debates on the societal impact and privacy of smart glasses with hands-on tests of new hardware from RayNeo, Rokid and Meta. Cutting through the show floor’s generic gadget noise, they highlight Android XR as a much-needed unifying layer to standardize development across fragmented wearable form factors.

HARDWARE NEWS & INDUSTRY ANNOUNCEMENTS

HTC is doubling down on smart glasses as traditional revenue streams decline, expanding the Vive Eagle into North America, Europe, and Australia. The hosts examine its rounded Panto design, slow-motion capture, and snap-on magnetic battery, alongside the viability of its post-trial AI subscriptions. They also look ahead to Meta’s newly announced workflow tool Muse and its upcoming glasses integration, followed by expectations for Apple’s imminent product event. Because if the ApirPod Cameras are coming that is Spatial Computing!

FEATURE: NEXTAPP DEVCON & BRIDGING MOBILE, GAMING, AND XR

Where will the developer base for mass-market XR originate? NextApp CEO Greg Fawson traces the event’s journey from Berlin’s 2009 Android meetups to a cross-platform summit, arguing that mainstream mobile engineers hold the real key to scaling spatial software. Previewing the upcoming three-day conference, the discussion covers dedicated tracks for XR, mobile gaming, and agentic AI coding, emphasizing the need for open community exchange to solve shared platform bottlenecks.

Get your tickets for NextAppCon here:
- Get one of 10 free ticket with the code spatialfree
- Get one of 100 tickets for 50% with the code spatial50

GenAI transparency notification: For this episode the audio of Greg has been optimized using the speach improvement tool of Adobe Podcast. No edits have been made with GenAI and no additional content was generated. All edits are made by hand with Adobe Audition.

INTERVIEW

What do you do when you meet somebody at a hackathon you work really well with? You found a new company! That is exactly what Ines Hilz and Andrew Douglas did after teaming up at a Meta Hackathon in London, going on to launch Sunflower VR and develop their new AI-driven AR try-on mirror, Aeva Display. In the interview, they delve into developing within Snap’s ecosystem, highlighting how Lens Studio’s AI-assisted toolset, agentic workflows, and environmental tracking features empower creators. Finally, they share crucial advice for hackathon participants developing for Snap Spectacles, emphasizing the necessity of testing frequently on-device to properly calibrate typography, color palettes, and transparency for additive holographic displays.

NEWS

- The Headset-Price Guess game! Featuring: Pico Space Pro, Steam Frame, Project Phoenix, Meta Ray-Ban Display 2
- Reading Suggestion: Smart Glasses: Why a Ban Is the Wrong Approach
- The representative poll of the day by Bitkom: How do you feel about smart glasses?
- Link-Tipp: “Harm Through the “#RizzCam”: Smart Glasses, Ambient Capture and Invisible Harassment”
- Apples iPhone-Event (September 9): AirPods with cameras!

Interview

Christoph Spinger is an XR Expert Engineer at Telekom MMS. When he isn’t leading teams and building cutting-edge products for clients, he regularly takes home prizes at contests and hackathons. Most recently, he won the XRCC Hackathon, currently the most important XR hackathon in Germany. His winning entry, "Handslation", translates any object you hold in your hand to help you learn a new language. In his case: Korean. He built the app for both the Pico 4 Ultra and the Rokid AI glasses.
Another highlight from his portfolio is Ballee, an experimental project exploring real-time object detection by bringing physical balls into interactive mixed reality scenarios.
As one of the most active XR developers in the scene today, Christoph will be joining the upcoming AI Hackathon at STARTPLATZ (Sept 4–6 in Cologne) as a mentor and jury member for the "Contextual AI Challenge" track. So you can really profit from his experience and excellence!

Join the challenge now: https://metaverse-podcast.de/contextual-ai-track-2026/

To get participants hyped and prepared, Christoph sits down with us to share his personal hackathon playbook and insider dev tips:

- App Inspiration: One fascinating "True Crime" app concept for location-based AI glasses that Kristoff hasn't built yet—and wants you to steal for the hackathon!
- The 48-Hour Hardware Playbook: What is the exact step-by-step strategy when building for AI & AR glasses under time pressure?
- Time Allocation: Why half of your hackathon time shouldn't be spent on coding at all—and what you should do instead to impress the jury.
- Team Dynamics: How to find the right teammates on-site in under 10 seconds.
- Dev Workflow & AI Tooling: Why you don't need to be a full game developer or native engineer anymore to build smart glasses apps, and how AI code editors like Cursor change the game.
Hardware Realities: The hidden technical bottlenecks (like Bluetooth speeds) you must consider when connecting smart glasses to a phone.

We also discussed these news:

- Samsung unveils more Smart Glasses designs at Samsung Unwrapped, July 22nd
- OpenAI interested in Smart Glasses, says OpenAI President Greg Brockman. But makes that sense?
- Essilor Luxottica, which is partnering with Meta to manufacture the most successful Ai glasses of all times the Meta Ray-Ban, is talking sales numbers: exponential and almost double than comparable time last year.

With the summer holidays just around the corner, we gather for one last comprehensive round of XR news before the seasonal slowdown.

→ Inspired by Josef Erl’s latest newsletter on heise.de — where he declares the end of all-rounder headsets and proposes four new VR categories — Thomas and I discuss what the upcoming autumn hardware wave will actually deliver.
→ We also untangle the latest rumors surrounding Meta's smart glasses: from "supersensing" devices without privacy LEDs switched on to Meta's aggressive countermeasures against hardware tampering. Plus: Meta is testing paid AI subscriptions. Meanwhile, Illinois has banned smart glasses behind the wheel entirely—we analyze the reasoning behind this drastic move.
→ In financial news, Even Realities has officially reached unicorn status with a new $150 million investment round. We look at why their camera-free, monochrome display approach is winning over investors.
→ Furthermore, the first dedicated Metaverse browser has launched, Thomas is explaining what it can actually do and we share our initial impressions.
→ Finally, we look at UBTECH's new U1 companion. Is this humanoid robot genuinely the future of home assistance, or is it just a highly uncanny, overly flexible smart speaker on legs?