Read this if you're tired of doing the most with the absolute least

But First…Cool if Real

This is real! I love demos like this because it shows why mixed reality has so much potential. In the early days of XR headsets, we preferred being in a mixed or augmented reality mode over VR because we could spend longer in those experiences without getting motion sick. Beat Saber is fine for a few songs, but we can play Pokemon Go all day.

Updates and Wins

When we saw how flight instructors debrief maneuvers, we knew it was a problem we had to solve. The current process is remarkably dumb: instructors must do the most with the absolute least. To attack the problem from all angles we added the ability to do a mixed reality brief/debrief from a flight simulator. Today, our Aura platform can ingest Microsoft Flight Simulator exports for a multi-user immersive sessions. Do you use a flight sim? Is there a flight or mission you wish you could have reviewed spatially?

Industry News

• Google Responds to Third-Party Developers About Their "Commitment" to Android XR. We love how fast Google kills things that don’t do what they set out to do. Risk is necessary when working with cutting-edge technologies that are still finding their product market fit. It’s not web, it’s not mobile. You shouldn’t make long-term commitments yet. You either want to be a part of that or you don’t. Imagine if we had bet the farm on LuminOS in 2019. We would now be coupled to an operating system that doesn’t exist anymore.

• Meta's Gradual, Gringing, and Multitrack-Approach to XR. “Visuals of dragons and whales be damned.” ➡️ might be our favorite way we’ve ever heard expressed that not all users are looking for a supercomputer in a pair of Maui Jims. I'm going to pick between my Nikon DSLR and my iPhone for different photo occasions. Users are willing to make the tradeoff for utility. We don’t hold any other industry to the “one device to rule them all” standard, so why are we asking it of XR?

• Google Invests $250M Into HTC Vive. First Google invested in Magic Leap's IP, then Samsung, and now HTC Vive. Our take: Maybe Google’s approach to XR today mirrors Intel’s strategy towards computing in the 90s. Intel sat back while other small companies optimized components (sound cards, video cards, graphics cards, etc.) before taking the best ideas and integrating them into their motherboards. It looks like Google is doing the same thing with XR by licensing the parts from various headset manufacturers that best serve their vision. Hopefully in this case we don’t see too much consolidation too soon, Magic Leap may be done making hardware but HTC is saying it's not.

• Sony Introduces the XYN Spatial Content Creation System. Confirmation bias for the win! Sony is sinking beaucoup investment dollars into an end-to-end platform called XYN (no idea how to say that one). It includes spatial capture, spatial content creation, and a headset. We also think low-friction content creation is key to XR mass adoption (I mean have you seen Katana and Katana Pro) and it’s a great affirmation to see some of the bigs investing in it too.

Recently Played >

What our founders listened to this week.

• 2024 in Review, 2025 Predictions. Quotable quote: "Meta Orion’s are what I wanted Apple Vision Pro to be.” The report these co-hosts have and how they are able to poke at each other’s ideas reminds us of our leadership team meeting debates.

• How Pokemon Go is Transforming How We Navigate the World Niantic POV: Gaussian splats are the key to making map data human readable vs machine-readable and therefore are the foundation of a truly coupled metaverse. 2025 will be the year of Gaussian splats.

• The Probe on a Mission to Touch the Sun We are playing space Russian roulette and it unnerves me that we aren’t doing more about our Sun. Before rolling out Aura for space weather, I’d never considered the sun a threat, short of getting a sunburn. But it is pure LUCK that the sun has hurled a CME in our direction since the Carrington event in the 1800s. A similar event would cause trillions of dollars in damage today. NASA is making the economic case for sending probes into the sun and we really ought to be doing a lot more. I don’t know about you but I like having a functioning GPS and electrical grid. Read more about the mission here

• Building Substack. We like this one because they talk about how to get developers excited about working on email technology (ie something not exciting). The TLDR: Think of email as one of the last pure forms of digital communication (no algo, no AI manipulating how you consume the content). It also makes it a prime platform for those building a personal brand.

Overheard on Slack

Enter the chat. What our devs are talking about…

• “I don’t understand how social media math math? 13k views, 130k impressions but two interactions?” LinkedIn analytics continue to boggle the mind.

• “This is the prettiest place I’ve ever run payroll from”

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Becoming Dauntless

Updates, wins, and asks at my startup, Dauntless. Plus our perspective on industry news and the occasional spicy take.