In partnership with
Executive summary
Welcome to your weekly briefing on the metaverse and spatial computing. Here are your snippets to sound smarter in meetings this week:
Top story: UK cinemas consider a ban on smart glasses (more below).
Other stories: ICE has banned staff from wearing Meta smart glasses in the workplace, treating them as prohibited personal body-worn cameras under existing agency policy, per The Register (more below).
Disquiet Gods, the sixth book in the Sun Eater series, is so heavy and thick that it has its own gravitational pull.
Top story
UK cinemas consider a ban on smart glasses.
What’s happening? The UK Cinema Association is having a think about whether they wish to ban smart glasses, though the organisation also considers the accessibility benefits of them too.
What’s the take? Mobile phones are not banned, and they can also film too. The issue here is being covert; if people wear them and look forward, it’s simply a great way to film UNLESS a member of staff sees the tell-all light of someone recording. Policing a ban would be a nightmare for cinema-goers, at a time when cinemas are already struggling.
This week’s stories
Activate has opened its first Berlin location.
Agis is acquiring UK XR studio Maze Theory, and launching its UGC engine, "The Platform."
CM Games will take Into the Radius 2 out of Quest Early Access on 27 August, adding its full campaign and new content.
FitXR has added knee strikes to its Combat and Flow workout modes on Meta Quest.
Frontiers in Virtual Reality published a peer-reviewed study finding that subjective fear rose significantly during graded VR spider exposure while physiological markers like heart rate and cortisol showed no matching increase.
NHS Supply Chain has opened a Medical Simulation and Technologies Framework tender whose immersive technology lot is worth £40 million, with bids due 28 September.
Pico has named its Apple Vision Pro rival Pico Space Pro, a mixed reality headset with roughly 4,000 PPI microOLED displays, set to debut in Beijing on 2 September.
Road to VR highlighted a new community database cataloguing 898 VR mods across 874 flatscreen PC games, graded by quality.
Treeview and VR Expert are partnering to help enterprise teams build and deploy custom XR applications for the upcoming XREAL AURA.
Virtualware has signed an agreement to acquire 100% of Manchester-based VR and RT3D visualisation firm Virtalis, a fixed €5mn payment plus a performance-linked variable component, with completion expected in September 2026.
Immersive Wire’s Support
To support the running of the Immersive Wire, I have accepted assistance from Wispr Flow. This is an app I use nearly every day on WhatsApp as well as my personal computer because it's genuinely a very good way of getting thoughts on paper relatively quickly (the thoughts themselves might be dubious, but that’s neither here nor there).
I really recommend it as it has actually sped up my typing; so consider having a peek if you're interested as well:
Write docs 4x faster. Without hating every second.
Nobody became a developer to write documentation. But the docs still need to get written — PRDs, README updates, architecture decisions, onboarding guides.
Wispr Flow lets you talk through it instead. Speak naturally about what the code does, how it works, and why you built it that way. Flow formats everything into clean, professional text you can paste into Notion, Confluence, or GitHub.
Used by engineering teams at OpenAI, Vercel, and Clay. 89% of messages sent with zero edits. Works system-wide on Mac, Windows, and iPhone.
Note: The Immersive Wire is run by Tom Ffiske, who also works at Accenture. The contents of the newsletter should not be regarded as Accenture’s views.
All spelling mistakes are deliberate, actually.
