The Window to Virtual Reality That Skips the Headset ft. Barmak Heshmat, CEO of Brelyon

About this episode

Charlie, Ted, and Rony open on Higgsfield's $400 million raise at a $5.4 billion valuation, and the uncomfortable gap between its strong revenue and a wave of user complaints about its terms of service (Charlie discloses he's a Higgsfield creative partner). From there: Snap's $2,195 Specs launch on September 16th, and Evan Spiegel's candid admission that he doesn't expect them to sell well, which Rony compares to Jensen Huang's decade-plus of staying the course before Nvidia's breakout. The group also digs into Epic Games quietly offloading Sketchfab and ArtStation to the much smaller KitBash, and a wide-ranging debate on AI filmmaking sparked by a Chatham House Rules event with Google and the American Film Institute, including Rony's memorable comparison of AI-native filmmakers to Skrillex versus the full-orchestra, Abbey-Road approach of traditional Hollywood.

Barmak Heshmat, founder and CEO of Brelyon, joins to make the case for immersive displays that skip the headset entirely. A former head of optics at the AR company Meta (not Facebook) and MIT computational imaging researcher, Barmak explains Brelyon's curved monitor, which uses monocular depth to create what he calls "a window to the virtual world" you look through rather than wear. The conversation covers why enterprise, not consumer, is where the technology is scaling first, a published study with Toyota on video pass-through windshields that could eliminate car glass entirely, and Barmak's longer-term vision for light field displays as the natural evolution beyond stereoscopic 3D.

Key Moments:

[03:35] Higgsfield's $400M raise and the backlash over its terms of service

[07:35] Snap's $2,195 Specs and the Jensen Huang long-game comparison

[11:35] Epic Games sheds Sketchfab and ArtStation to KitBash

[17:35] Inside a Chatham House Rules AI filmmaking summit with Google and AFI

[21:35] The Skrillex vs. Beatles theory of AI-native filmmaking

[28:35] Barmak Heshmat joins to tell us about building the Brelyon's headset-less display

[33:35] How monocular depth creates a "window to the virtual world"

[46:35] A published study with Toyota on video pass-through windshields

[53:35] The future: light field displays and headsets as an accessory

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