Mike Golembewski is an interactive designer, researcher, and writer running MWG Design & Research, an independent consultancy focused on immersive media, artistic practice, and emerging technology. In this episode, Mike breaks down the structural challenges facing cultural XR, the category of immersive work that functions more like theatre or documentary than gaming. We cover why festival-premiered XR experiences rarely survive beyond their premiere, why platform stores like Meta and Steam are fundamentally misaligned with this type of work, and what creators can do from day one to design for longevity. Mike also highlights real examples and explains why thinking about the long tail before writing a single line of code is the only approach that actually works.

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Andrey Shelomentsev is the co-founder of Splatica, a London-based physical AI infrastructure startup building consumer-grade 3D reality capture pipelines. In this episode, we get into the real trade-offs between capture tools, how Splatica's one-click cloud pipeline turns a casual walk-around with an Insta360 into a navigable 3D Gaussian Splat scene overnight and what we need to turn photorealistic Gaussian Splats into a synthetic training ground for robots.
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In this episode, Ruben Frosali, founder of TRIDOT and Head of Cinematics at JADU AR, unpacks how he builds interactive Gaussian Splat experiences across Unity, AI generation tools, and mobile AR. Drawing on two decades of work across film, music videos, volumetric capture, shaders, and real time graphics, Ruben explains how 3DGS can be used in production workflows. He also shares how tools like World Labs and Sharp change the speed and flexibility of 3D world creation, where web workflows may outpace closed engines, and why optimization for phones matters as much as file compression.
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