The Podcast
It was a pleasure to sit down with my friend Matthias Röder for the latest Sonophilia Creativity and Tech Talk. We covered a lot of ground – from my early days in Hawaii building the first online travel reservation engines to where we are heading with “embodied” AI.
If you missed the session, here are a few of the core themes we explored:
The Convergence of Travel and Tech
Looking back at my career, from AOL and Lonely Planet to building Wikitude, there’s always been a parallel track between tourism and technology innovation. Whether it was the first mobile apps in 2008 or today’s XR and AI solutions, the goal has always been very similar: using technology to help us better understand things and/or to better navigate the physical world around us.
Beyond the Gimmicks: Embodied AI
We’ve all seen the “gimmicky” side of AR – think Pokémon GO. But the real game-changer happened about three years ago with the rise of Large Language Models like ChatGPT. At my current venture, we are focusing a lot on Embodied Conversational AI, 3D and XR.
Imagine putting on a headset and standing face-to-face with a life-sized 3D avatar that doesn’t just read a script, but actually listens, reacts with human-like facial expressions, and holds a real-time conversation. We’re moving from “searching for info” to “interacting with intelligence.” [08:54]
Why 2D Still Matters
While I’ve spent 17 years in 3D, I’ve realized that accessibility is key. Not everyone wants to wear a headset all day. That’s why we’ve been working on projects like the one for Österreich Werbung (Austrian National Tourist Office), where we created 2D AI video avatars for large displays at trade shows. It provides a natural, human interface for Q&A without the barrier of hardware. [10:45]
The Future is in the Glasses
I’m currently experimenting heavily with the Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. They aren’t full AR yet (they don’t project 3D images into my eyes), but they have “multimodal” AI. I can ask my glasses, “What monument am I looking at?” and they can tell me the history of the Mozart statue in real-time. [18:27]
In the next 2–3 years, I expect we’ll see a massive surge in this space as Samsung, Apple, and Google release their own iterations.
Creativity = Innovation
For me, creativity is synonymous with innovation. It’s not just about the tech itself, but about the “tinkering”—combining two things that haven’t been joined before, like Mixed Reality and AI, to see what happens.
Watch the full talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEIe3Kik11w
Stay curious, Andy
