You’d think Thanksgiving week would bring the tech news cycle to heel for a few days. The streets and freeways here in So Cal are eerily empty but not the news. It’s not Thanksgiving week anywhere else in the world, so it keeps turning.
Snapchat nears 1 billion users Snapchat is up to 943 million monthly active users worldwide and closing in on the 1 billion mark. Growth is coming from India and Pakistan, where TikTok is banned and cheap Android phones drive adoption, while usage in the United States and major European markets is slipping. Snap is still losing money and its stock has collapsed from an $83 peak to single digits. Evan Spiegel told staff the company is in a “crucible moment” as it leans harder on AR ads and a planned 2026 smart glasses launch to restore growth. I still can’t figure out how they are stillfail to monetize a billion monthly uniques.
Meta Reality Labs unveiled WorldGen, a research system that generates fully walkable 3D environments from a single text prompt. Instead of a single camera view, WorldGen produces coherent scenes up to fifty by fifty meters that can be loaded into Unity or Unreal, complete with navmeshes and decomposed objects for editing. The pipeline combines layout generation, diffusion based reconstruction, mesh refinement and texturing. Current limitations include no multi floor spaces, no seamless indoor outdoor transitions and no texture reuse, which hurts performance on mobile VR. Meta is treating WorldGen as research for now, not a Horizon Worlds feature.
Warner Music settles and partners with Suno. Following a similar settlement with AI music generator, Udio, Warner Musica and Suno have entered into a licensing partnership. As we predicted, this deal looks a lot of arrangements over blank tapes in the 80s, and sampling in the 90s. Suno will roll out licensed models in 2026, letting Warner artists opt in to allow their names, voices and compositions to used in AI generated songs. Free tier users will be limited to streaming and sharing, while paid users face monthly download caps with extra purchases available.
Ive and Altman finally show their AI hardware hand. At Emerson Collective’s 2025 Demo Day, Sam Altman and Jony Ive said they now have a working prototype of OpenAI’s first hardware device. Ive described the object as simple, beautiful and playful, roughly the size of a phone and likely screen free according to earlier reporting. He suggested it could ship in under two years. Altman said the team abandoned an earlier design because it lacked the “I want to take a bite of it” pull he wanted from the product. Details on inputs, connectivity and pricing remain secret, but the hardware project is clearly moving.
New Real Madrid and Red Bull content for Vision Pro. Apple is adding new immersive video experiences to Vision Pro built around Real Madrid and Red Bull branded events. The Real Madrid project extends Apple’s existing sports push, while Red Bull brings its action sports catalog into Apple’s 180 degree high resolution format. This is an incremental but important for a still sparse native Vision Pro content library. Release is coming through the Apple TV app, with no mention of broader headset access beyond Vision Pro.
Meta Hyperscape goes social. The new app turns high quality scans of real locations into shared virtual spaces. Quest users can already capture fully walkable environments using headset sensors. The new release lets up to eight people visit those spaces together, either in VR on a Quest headset or on a phone through the Meta Horizon app. Rendering has moved from the cloud to local hardware for smoother sessions. Meta is pitching this as a way for families and friends to hang out inside favorite places when they cannot meet in person, with more capacity promised.
Casio Introduces AI Pet, Moflin, Just In Time For Christmas. Moflin arrives as a new entry in the slow growing field of AI powered companion robots. It sells for about four hundred twenty nine dollars and uses emotional recognition to create the impression of a small creature that reacts to touch, sound and presence. Casio positions it as a smart companion that develops a unique personality over several weeks.
Pico’s New Vision Pro Mixed Reality Headset. ByteDance owned Pico is preparing a premium mixed reality headset for 2026 to compete directly against Apple Vision Pro. The device is said to use a self developed display chip rather than an off the shelf component, backing up earlier hints that Pico wants more control over optics and power draw. Details on price, resolution and international availability are still missing. The product is expected to debut in China first. The piece situates this as a high end counterweight to Meta and Samsung’s Android XR efforts in the standalone headset market. To the extent anyone gives an cares about this categoty anymore. Arguebly, Pico is foolishly facing off with misguided titans, who are already focused on less immersive but lighter and much, much cheaper AI audio smartglasses.
Hotel Infinity, a new “impossible architecture” project from Manifold Garden creator William Chyr launches. The game started as an experiment to bring Manifold Garden’s gravity bending puzzles into VR before evolving into an original title set in an endless hotel that folds back on itself. Chyr describes Hotel Infinity as a long term project built around careful level design rather than rapid content drops. The piece positions it as a potential showcase for VR spatial puzzles, with early footage focused on meditative exploration rather than combat or fast twitch gameplay. No firm release date or platform list yet.
Google has been testing its new Flow AI video generation workflow by helping artists create short films exclusively with its tools.
This column has a companion, The AI/XR Podcast, hosted by its author, Charlie Fink, and Ted Schilowitz, former studio executive and futurist for Paramount and Fox, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week’s guest is David Jiang, founder and CEO, Viture. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.
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