Meta, AI Stalk Hollywood As AWE Opens And Tribeca, Cannes Spotlight XR
Montage of attendees experiencing XR at AWE 2024.
Augmented World Expo's 16th annual conference opens in Long Beach Tuesday. XR's flagship event will draw 5,000 attendees, 250 exhibitors, and keynotes from Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Lucky, and an appearance by the entire Bushnell family. This year's theme: XR is going mainstream. 'The hardware is good enough, the tools are mature, and AI has lowered the barrier to entry,' says AWE co-founder Ori Inbar.
Instant A/B test, updated, personalized marketing, perhaps even featuring the viewer, is possible ... More now that AI has made content liquid.
Meta Aims to Fully Automate Ad Creation Using AI. Meta plans to let brands create and target ads entirely through artificial intelligence by the end of 2026, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing company sources. The new system will allow advertisers to upload a product image and budget; Meta's AI will generate the ad's images, video, text, and targeting across Facebook and Instagram. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the goal is to deliver measurable results at scale, automating the process from creative to placement. Some brands are cautious, raising concerns about creative control and ad quality as Meta pushes further into AI-driven advertising.
In December, 2024, academy award winning filmmaker James Cameron entered a multi-year exclusive ... More partnership to produce spatial and mixed reality content for Meta Quest headsets. Here the director poses during a photo session in Paris on April 3, 2024. (Photo by JOEL SAGET / AFP) (Photo by JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images)
Meta Seeks More Hollywood Deals for New Virtual Reality Headset having already signed James Cameron in December, Meta's media team is now in talks with Disney, A24, and several smaller production studios to secure exclusive content for a new premium virtual reality headset, expected to launch next year. According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta is reportedly prepared to invest millions to acquire episodic and standalone immersive videos based on well-known intellectual properties. The device, internally called 'Loma,' is designed to compete directly with Apple's Vision Pro.
Glance shaved twenty years and twenty pounds, making me look very fashionable indeed.
The Glance AI virtual try-on app is blowing my mind and picking my pocket. You give it a selfie. It uses Google's Imagen 4 to shave off the pounds (and years), puts you in fitted fashion from hundreds of brands, and pops it up on your lockscreen, begging for attention. It is very effective. Backed by Google and Jio.
Character.ai Launches Major Upgrade with Enhanced Conversational Abilities The update introduces more natural, context-aware interactions, with improved memory retention and multi-turn dialogue capabilities. Character.ai is now able to handle more nuanced prompts and maintain context over longer conversations. The upgrade also adds new customization tools, allowing users to fine-tune character personalities and responses.
Following a successful pilot in Santa Monica, CA, this fall, Dreampark is scaling up.
DreamPark raises $1.1M to transform real-world spaces into mixed-reality theme parks Brent Bushnell, the creative force behind Two Bit Circus, which was taken down in its prime by Covid, has raised $1.1 million in seed funding from Boost VC, Greycroft, and F4 Fund. DreamPark develops downloadable mixed reality experiences, or what they call 'theme parks,' that overlay interactive games and attractions onto physical locations like parks and malls. They've launched successful pilots in Santa Monica and San Francisco. The money will help them develop more experiences for smartphones and Mixed Reality headsets and add more venues.
This year's immersive selection is available until June 26th.
Tribeca Immersive's In Search of Us (co-curated by Onassis ONX) is now on view at WSA (161 Water Street, NYC) through June 29th. The show is comprised of eleven commissioned experiences that use a mix of immersive and generative AI technologies to create experiences with social and artistic impact.
If you can't tell the difference, there is no difference.
Everyone Is Already Using AI (And Hiding It) Generative AI is now deeply embedded in Hollywood, with studios using it for everything from visual effects to entire scenes—often without public acknowledgment. While new union contracts bar studios from using AI-written scripts or digitally cloning actors without consent, they allow for synthetic performers and AI-generated footage if a human is nominally in charge. Studios are moving cautiously amid legal uncertainty, especially over how AI models are trained on copyrighted material. Despite public hesitation, nearly every major studio is experimenting with generative AI tools, often to cut costs and speed up production as budgets shrink and pressure mounts.
Google Deepmind's industry emissary Matthieu Lorrain, calls Henry Daubrez' Electric Pink, commissioned for Google I/O, one of the best films he's ever seen. Daubrez calls the film 'a self-directed therapy session about memory, identity, and creative wiring.' He used Imagen 3 to lock the art direction and Veo 2 to animate. 'As the project came together, the tools themselves converged into Google's new Flow system: a seamless pipeline built on DeepMind's tech stack.'
Darren Aronofsky's Primordial Soup and Google DeepMind Partner on AI film, Ancestra, by Eliza McNitt. Primordial Soup, has formed a strategic partnership with Google DeepMind to develop AI-powered tools for filmmakers, beginning with Ancestra, a hybrid live-action short directed by Eliza McNitt and premiering at the Tribeca Festival on June 13.
For ten days, from May 15 to May 25, 2025, the Cannes Film Festival hosted the second edition of its Immersive Competition at the historic Carlton Hotel. The jury, led by Oscar-winner Luc Jacquet, awarded From Dust—a virtual reality opera by Michel van der Aa—the Best Immersive Work Award. Sixteen works from nine countries were exhibited, with nine competing for the 'Best Immersive Work' award. More than 5,000 tickets were booked for experiences ranging from VR and video projection to AI-driven installations and the festival's first video game. 'The Immersive Competition is about creating space for new ways of storytelling — where the relationship between audience, narrative, and space can be reimagined,' said Elie Levasseur, Head of the Immersive Competition. The Marché du Film also launched its first Curators Network aboard the Art Explora catamaran, connecting 60 curators and producers to support global immersive arts distribution.
This column serves as the script for the news segment of my weekly AI/XR Podcast, co-hosted by former Paramount futurist and co-founder of Red Camera, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap, Mako Robotics, and Synthbee AI. This week's guest is entrepreneur and producer Bryn Mooser, founder ASTERIA Co-Founder MOONVALLEY and XTR, DOCUMENTARY+, and RYOT. You can find us on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.
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