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Welcome back to our weekly roundup of happenings from XR and AI realms. Let’s dive in…
The Lede
MWC 2026: AI and XR Take Center Stage. Barcelona’s 20th Mobile World Congress demonstrated that smart glasses are no longer a sideshow. Market analyst Smart Analytics Global has declared 2026 the year the smart glasses market truly takes off, projecting global revenue to surge from $1.2 billion last year to $5.6 billion, with shipments forecast to hit 75 million units by 2030. Google’s Android XR monocular AI glasses were the talk of the show, featuring real-time translation, Gemini integration, and slick navigation, with wait times stretching two hours. Two hours to see how bad monocular AR is. Alibaba’s Qwen Glasses drew crowds of influencers from across Asia and Europe, while Chinese AI firm iFlytek showed 40-gram glasses with real-time subtitle translation across 96 languages, using bone conduction mics and lip-movement recognition to cut through noisy environments. XGIMI’s MemoMind One took a different, stripped-down approach: no camera, just a waveguide displaying information directly into your field of view, priced at $599 and shipping in April. The message from every booth: the race to out-Meta Meta is officially on.
Feeling Spatial
Smart Contact Lenses Move Closer to Reality. At MWC 2026, Dubai-based XPANCEO demonstrated the core technologies converging into its first fully integrated smart contact lens, combining image display, health monitoring, and wireless power in a single device. The company, backed by Nobel laureate Konstantin Novoselov and recognized as a top-three physics startup by the Nature Index, has built 28 prototypes over four years. Standalone applications already exist for glaucoma detection, drug monitoring, and AR vision in aerospace and motorsport. Founders plan to publicly wear the integrated prototype in early 2027. The goal: replace your phone, your glasses, and your doctor’s appointment with a single lens.
Pico Sees an Opening. Someone is ready to fill the enterprise void Meta is leaving behind. Pico has launched PICO OS 6 and announced Project Swan, a new enterprise XR headset due in late 2026. With Meta having discontinued Horizon Workrooms and ceased commercial Quest sales in February, and Apple shipping fewer than 45,000 Vision Pro units in Q4 2025, there is no dominant player in enterprise XR — and Pico is making its move.
The AI Desk
Netflix Buys Ben Affleck’s Secret AI Company. Less than a week after walking away from a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix quietly acquired InterPositive, an AI filmmaking company founded by Ben Affleck that had been operating in stealth mode. InterPositive’s first AI model was trained to understand visual logic and editorial consistency, handling missing shots, background replacements, and lighting corrections using a production’s own dailies. The technology is exclusive to Netflix; Affleck joins as senior advisor. The timing is loaded: SAG-AFTRA’s contract expires in June, with AI the central issue. Netflix says the tools empower storytellers. Hollywood has heard that before.
Jack Dorsey Lays Off Half His Company (4,000 people). Because of AI. Block, the company behind Square, Cash App, and Afterpay, cut its staff by 40%, eliminating more than 4,000 jobs and reducing its workforce to just under 6,000. In a note to the company, Dorsey didn’t soften the message. “We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” wrote the founder and CEO. Naturally, Block’s stock surged 20%.
The Pentagon Shakeup That Made Claude No. 1. The biggest AI story of the week was a geopolitical clash that reshuffled the consumer AI market overnight. Anthropic lost its Pentagon contract after refusing to allow its AI models to be deployed for mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Hours later, OpenAI stepped in and announced its own deal with the Department of Defense. The backlash was swift. Claude climbed to the No. 1 spot on Apple’s App Store, dethroning ChatGPT. A Reddit post urging users to “Cancel and Delete ChatGPT!!!” racked up 30,000 upvotes, and an Instagram account called “quitGPT” gained thousands of followers. The surge was so intense that Claude went down on March 2nd, with Anthropic citing “unprecedented demand” for the outage. Anthropic’s principled stand has become a surprise marketing win.
OpenAI Keeps Iterating. OpenAI released GPT-5.3 Instant this week, focused on improving conversational flow, more accurate web-sourced answers, and fewer unnecessary refusals. The company specifically addressed feedback that its previous model felt “preachy” or “cringe.” It’s a telling acknowledgment that the model wars are now being fought as much on personality and tone as raw capability.
Utopai Offers Filmmakers New PAI Gen-Video Model. SF’s Utopai Studios launched public access this week to PAI, a new cinematic AI video model designed for sustained, multi-scene storytelling. Developed for its own use, Utopia decided to offer PAI to the public as a full workflow, from script, through design and editing. After using it a short time, I would say it compares with the best of Kling, Veo, Seedance, Luma, LTX, Runway, and Adobe Firefly. While I appreciate the simplicity of the design, PAI needs to add popular features, presets and controls offered by competitor platforms. The new model excels at keeping characters and environments stable across sequences and supporting frame-level editing without restarting the whole sequence. In its launch configuration, PAI supports up to 16 shots in a single narrative flow, outputs up to one minute, and renders at up to 4K. The platform also blocks generation against copyrighted IP and public figure likenesses at the workflow level. The team includes veterans from Google Research, Meta, Amazon, and Adobe Firefly.
Spatial Audio
For more spatial commentary & insights, check out the AI/XR Podcast, hosted by the author of this column, Charlie Fink, and Ted Schilowitz, former studio executive and futurist for Paramount and Fox, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week our guests are Dr. Aiden He and Dr. Salman Avestimehr, co-founders of Teamily AI. You can find it on podcasting platforms Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.
Charlie Fink is an author and futurist focused on spatial computing. See his books here. Spatial Beats contains insights and inputs from Fink’s collaborators including Paramount Pictures futurist Ted Shilowitz.