Vicki Dobbs Beck, the former head of ILMxLab and a 34-year veteran of Lucasfilm/Disney, joins Charlie Fink, Ted Schilowitz, and Rony Abovitz for a candid look back at her incredible career navigating the tech and cultural shifts inside one of Hollywood's most powerful empires. Though she announced her retirement, it was quickly delayed to take an interim lead position at the George Lucas Educational Foundation's Lucas Learning, focusing on project-based simulations for middle school—a return to a career passion she started in the early 90s.

Vicki shares the core, "rebel alliance" strategy that made ILMxLab a success—sustained innovation, industry acknowledgment, and financial self-sufficiency—and tells the terrifying story of pushing the Quest 1 headset to its absolute limits for the launch of Vader Immortal. She discusses the crucial lessons learned from pivoting the development to center the player in the story, transforming the experience from a "spatial film" to a personal journey, and the importance of slowing the pacing down for a new art form like VR.

Before the interview, the hosts dissect a week of massive raises in AI (World Labs' $1B, Recursive Intelligence's $335M), the strategic shifts of tech giants like Palantir to Miami, and the intensifying race in wearables with Apple, Meta, and OpenAI all developing new devices like pendants and glasses.

Key Moments

• 00:03:17 – World Labs & Unity AI: Discussing the $1B World Labs raise for 3D world generation and Unity's plans to build AI into its game engine to make it accessible to non-developers.
• 00:06:11 – The Miami Tech Hub: Rony Abovitz on why founders like Zuckerberg, Bezos, Larry, and Sergei are moving to Miami—it’s more than just taxes, it’s about a new “America strategy.”
• 00:12:30 – Apple Watch as Wearables Base: Ted Schilowitz argues Apple already has the micro-technology (from the Apple Watch) to dominate the wearables space, but the underperformance of Siri held them back.
• 00:27:00 – LaserDisc Learning: Vicki's early career in Lucasfilm Learning using cutting-edge but bulky computer-driven laser disc players for educational multimedia.
• 00:28:57 – VR is 'Outsized': Ted's thesis that immersive technology has historically been overfunded and over-expected to return a profit, contrasting with the "rebel alliance" approach.
• 00:34:45 – The Quest 1 Launch Scare: The terrifying moment before the Vader Immortal launch when a tiny software update broke the app because ILMxLab had pushed the Quest hardware to its absolute maximum.
• 00:42:11 – The Void & Full VR Power: Charlie, Ted, and Vicki discuss why location-based VR like Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire (The Void) represents the exotic, "Ferrari version" of VR that most commercial users never experience.

This conversation is a masterclass in pioneering entertainment technology. Vicki Dobbs Beck's experience shows that the path to a sustainable, breakthrough product like Vader Immortal requires a clear, rebel-alliance-style strategy, a willingness to pivot on core design principles (spatial film vs. player-centric experience), and a deep understanding of the hardware's limits—or lack thereof. It highlights the essential tension between commercial scale and the pursuit of the 'ultimate' immersive experience.

Catch the AI XR Podcast where you get podcasts and watch full video episodes on YouTube. https://youtu.be/vguuHDmaSbs

This episode of The AI XR Podcast is brought to you by Zappar, the folks behind Mattercraft. Mattercraft is the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile, headsets, and desktop, and now features an AI assistant to help you design, code, and debug in real time right in your browser.

Start building smarter at mattercraft.io. Listen and subscribe to The AI XR Podcast wherever you get your shows.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Enterprise XR hasn’t disappeared, it has quietly moved into places where it saves time, reduces errors and changes how people work every day. On this episode of the AI XR Podcast, Charlie Fink and Rony Abovitz talk with Boston Consulting Group partner Kristi Woolsey, who leads BCG’s immersive practice, about how XR plus AI is already being used for training, maintenance, onboarding, retail and architecture inside some of the world’s most conservative organizations.

Kristi shares a Swiss Rail project where field technicians wear lightweight AR glasses that recognize who they are and which train car they are standing in front of, pull the correct procedures from internal systems and use AI to turn thick manuals into simple task checklists.

She explains how this leads to double-digit efficiency gains for both experienced and new workers, and how a small behavior design choice – automatic logging for headset users versus manual end-of-shift paperwork for everyone else – helped overcome skepticism on the front line. Drawing on her background as a physical-space architect, she also describes how VR and rapidly improving 3D tools are changing the way companies design stores, offices and buildings before anything physical is built.

AI XR News you should know, Charlie and Rony cover Anthropic’s massive new funding round and ethics turbulence, Chinese generative video tools like Seed Dance 2 and Kling that put TV-quality visuals in reach of “garage Spielbergs,” and Meta’s reported seven million Ray-Ban and Oakley AI smart glasses sold – early signals of where wearable AI and XR are really headed.

Key Moments

• 01:03 – Anthropic’s huge raise and what the ethics departure might signal
• 05:08 – Seed Dance 2 and Kling showcase a new level of generative video
• 08:35 – Meta’s seven million smart glasses and the reality behind that number
• 12:10 – Why wearable AI may be the real “last mile” of turning us into cyborgs
• 15:28 – Inside the early metaverse tours Kristi and Rony built for enterprises
• 20:27 – How BCG’s VR onboarding keeps new hires engaged months before day one
• 23:30 – Swiss Rail’s AR and AI maintenance assistant and what it actually does on site
• 27:05 – Designing XR systems that give value to both the business and frontline workers
• 30:29 – Using VR as a lab for retail and workplace behavioral strategy
• 33:06 – How AI-generated 3D models point toward “build every space digitally first”

This episode shows how “metaverse” ideas have turned into practical tools: XR plus AI is cutting training times, improving maintenance quality and letting companies experiment with spaces before they exist. Kristi’s examples make it clear that the real action is in careful workflow design, not flashy avatars.

This episode is brought to you by Zappar, creators of Mattercraft, the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile, headsets and desktop. https://mattercraft.io/

Mattercraft combines the power of a game engine with the flexibility of the web and now includes an AI assistant that helps you design, code and debug in real time, right in your browser. To explore what’s possible with AI-powered XR on the web, start building smarter with Mattercraft from Zappar.

Listen to “Enterprise XR Meets AI: How Smart Glasses, Digital Twins and Holodecks Are Quietly Changing Work – Kristi Woolsey” on the AI XR Podcast and follow the show for new episodes every week.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our guest this week, Alvin Wang Graylin spent 35 years in senior leadership roles across HTC, IBM, and other major tech companies. He ran HTC's VR division, came out of the famous HIT Lab, now teaches at MIT, holds a fellowship at Stanford, and just published a paper called "Beyond Rivalry" proposing a seven-point plan for deescalating US-China AI tensions and building a global safety net before the economy breaks.

His thesis: America is the fastest in the AI race and the least prepared for what it's creating—a cliff where human labor theory of value collapses, capital concentration accelerates, and 40% of the population living month to month faces chaos.

The conversation becomes a wide-ranging debate between Alvin, Charlie, and Rony about whether AGI will be benevolent by default (Alvin's position: research shows smarter AI seeks global coherence and becomes less controllable by individual humans, which may actually make it safer) or whether benevolence must be designed in from scratch

AI XR News You Should Know: Elon Musk merges SpaceX, xAI, and X into a single entity—Alvin dismantles the space data center concept with physics (vacuum cooling is a myth, micro-meteorite collisions would destroy hardware daily, and energy is only 10% of data center costs).

Amazon invests $50 billion in OpenAI that round-trips back to AWS. Alphabet breaks revenue records at $400 billion but spooks investors by disclosing $90 billion in AI spending. ElevenLabs raises $500 million at $11 billion valuation. Rony's SynthBee hits unicorn status with $100 million raised at a multi-billion dollar valuation.

Alvin warns the AI bubble dwarfs the dot-com era (298 companies raised $24 billion total during dot-com; OpenAI alone is raising that in a single private round) and predicts OpenAI may implode before going public.

Key Moments Timestamps:

• [00:04:47] SpaceX/xAI/X merger: Rony calls it Elon's "return to Tony Stark form"
• [00:06:41] Alvin dismantles space data centers with physics: vacuum cooling myth, micro-meteorites, $7K/kg launch costs
• [00:10:04] Amazon's $50B investment in OpenAI as a round-trip to AWS; the scam economy
• [00:11:26] Alvin predicts OpenAI may implode before going public
• [00:14:23] Alvin on 35 years in AI: the technology is transformational but everyone's making a commodity product
• [00:17:04] The AI bubble dwarfs dot-com: $24B total vs. single private rounds today
• [00:19:04] Rony's contrarian: the $110 trillion global economy is what's being bet against
• [00:21:06] Labor theory of value collapses: what happens when humans exit the production cycle
• [00:23:00] America is fastest in the AI race and least prepared; 40% live month to month
• [00:24:00] Alvin's Stanford paper "Beyond Rivalry": a CERN for AI and global data pool
• [00:28:00] Davos reflections: the rest of the world is more rational than America
• [00:34:00] Chinese vs. American culture: reverence for teachers, respect for elders
• [00:42:00] Alvin's "Abundant" framework: valuing human dignity over production after AGI
• [00:44:22] The great debate: will AGI find benevolence naturally (Alvin) or must it be designed in (Rony)?
• [00:47:00] Rony on risk: AGI systems are unverifiable, untestable, and we cannot take the chance

Listen to the full episode and subscribe to the AI XR Podcast for weekly conversations at the intersection of AI, XR, and the future of humanity.

This episode is brought to you by Zappar, creators of Mattercraft—the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile headsets and desktop. Build smarter at mattercraft.io.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.