Audience Is Dead. Meet the ‘Actience'. ft. Charles Melcher, Author of "The Future of Storytelling"
The AI XR Podcast.Show Notes
Ted and Charlie open with a quieter AI news week, giving them room to dig into XR hardware, including hands-on impressions of two new smart glasses, a Norway story on camera glasses restrictions, the shutdown of the XR Association, backlash over Meta’s Muse app, and a tour through AI’s fast-moving film scene.
Charles Melcher, founder of the Future of Storytelling summit and author of the book of the same name, joins to talk about two decades spent studying how people want to experience stories. Charles explains why he thinks VR never quite broke through for mainstream audiences, walks through his theory of the “actience,” his term for audiences who now expect to participate rather than just watch, and makes the case that AI’s biggest opportunity in entertainment isn’t visual effects but deeply personalized, responsive storytelling. The conversation wraps with a tour through some of the best immersive entertainment happening right now, from the Sphere and ABBA Voyage to Meow Wolf and Vegas’s underground escape-room scene.
Key Moments: [00:39] Hands-on impressions of Samsung’s Aura vs. Snap’s Specs [03:29] The ergonomics problem still holding back smart glasses [06:39] Norway’s new restrictions on camera glasses [08:26] The XR Association shuts down [10:00] Meta’s Muse app and the backlash over its user dossiers [11:47] A tour through the fast-moving world of AI filmmaking [18:00] Charles Melcher joins — the origin of Future of Storytelling [24:15] Why VR never had its mainstream moment [39:00] Charles’s concept of the “actience” [42:33] A tour of the Sphere, ABBA Voyage, and Meow Wolf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from The AI XR Podcast.
Ted and Charlie open with a news roundup covering Colossal Biosciences’ real-world take on a Snow Crash robotic companion, a secretly recorded OpenAI meeting, and the wave of tech billionaires suddenly pledging away chunks of their fortunes. From there they dig into Robert Downey Jr. joining Snap, the relaunch of VR fitness app Supernatural, and why training and simulation keep proving to be VR’s most durable use case.
Charlie, Ted, and Rony open on the week's AI political theater, from the sudden rebrand of AI to "superintelligence" to Dario Amodei's uncomfortable White House appearance. From there, the conversation covers AMD's acquisition of Fei-Fei Li's World Labs, the curious divergence between OpenAI's and Anthropic's paths toward going public, and Rony's read on why liability risk may be the real story behind both. They also dig into Nvidia's push to regulate AI safety at the chip level, a stranger-than-fiction report about Anthropic bringing religious leaders in to discuss whether Claude might be conscious, OpenAI's new companion AI "Dots," and a candid look at where consumer VR actually stands right now.
Cortney Harding steps in as guest co-host this week, joining Charlie to unpack a genuinely strong Meta Connect, new occluded VR glasses aimed squarely at the Vision Pro, a camera-free Ray-Ban, and Muse AI's surprise climb to the top of the app stores. From there, the conversation turns to Disney's newly created CTO role, the quiet fate of its big-money bets on Epic Games and Sora, and Jeffrey Katzenberg's open letter arguing entertainment has always been a technology business. They close out the news with a sharp exchange on Amazon's push into drone delivery and a pointed critique of DraftKings' use of AI to target its most engaged, and most vulnerable, customers.
Charlie and Rony open with Charlie's hands-on take on Snap's $2,200 Specs launch and Rony's theory on how big tech companies let smaller players pioneer risky new hardware first. From there, the conversation turns to a tense week in AI safety, sparked by Dario Amodei's call for frontier labs to slow down, and a sharp debate over whether the industry's talk of needing regulation is really about something else entirely. They close out the news with a look at how China is approaching AI development differently than the West, plus a genuinely stunning breakthrough in brain-computer interfaces.
Recorded on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, this episode opens on a somber note: Charlie, Rony, and Ted remember where they were in 2001 and reflect on where they are now. By happenstance, Ted is actually in New York right now & is joined by the team behind GLO, a mixed-reality graffiti tour running through the streets of Manhattan on Magic Leap 2 headsets, live from their office. After a brief catch-up with friends (and a promo code waiting for you at the end of this description), the news turns dark fast. Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon's resignation, and his warning that AI could kill us all within a decade, sparks a pointed debate about why the AI industry has no equivalent of the FAA or FDA, and why "regulate it like we regulate everything else dangerous" isn't the same as stopping innovation.