E134 - Developing for AI Glasses + AI Glasses News with Christoph Spinger from Telekom MMS

Interview Christoph Spinger is an XR Expert Engineer at Telekom
MMS. When he isn’t leading teams and building cutting-edge products
for clients, he regularly takes home prizes at contests and
hackathons. Most recently, he won the XRCC Hackathon, currently the
most important XR hackathon in Germany. His winning entry,
"Handslation", translates any object you hold in your hand to help
you learn a new language. In his case: Korean. He built the app for
both the Pico 4 Ultra and the Rokid AI glasses. Another highlight
from his portfolio is Ballee, an experimental project exploring
real-time object detection by bringing physical balls into
interactive mixed reality scenarios. As one of the most active XR
developers in the scene today, Christoph will be joining the
upcoming AI Hackathon at STARTPLATZ (Sept 4–6 in Cologne) as a
mentor and jury member for the "Contextual AI Challenge" track. So
you can really profit from his experience and excellence! Join the
challenge now:
https://metaverse-podcast.de/contextual-ai-track-2026/ To get
participants hyped and prepared, Christoph sits down with us to
share his personal hackathon playbook and insider dev tips: - App
Inspiration: One fascinating "True Crime" app concept for
location-based AI glasses that Kristoff hasn't built yet—and wants
you to steal for the hackathon! - The 48-Hour Hardware Playbook:
What is the exact step-by-step strategy when building for AI &
AR glasses under time pressure? - Time Allocation: Why half of your
hackathon time shouldn't be spent on coding at all—and what you
should do instead to impress the jury. - Team Dynamics: How to find
the right teammates on-site in under 10 seconds. - Dev Workflow
& AI Tooling: Why you don't need to be a full game developer or
native engineer anymore to build smart glasses apps, and how AI
code editors like Cursor change the game. Hardware Realities: The
hidden technical bottlenecks (like Bluetooth speeds) you must
consider when connecting smart glasses to a phone. We also
discussed these news: - Samsung unveils more Smart Glasses designs
at Samsung Unwrapped, July 22nd - OpenAI interested in Smart
Glasses, says OpenAI President Greg Brockman. But makes that sense?
- Essilor Luxottica, which is partnering with Meta to manufacture
the most successful Ai glasses of all times the Meta Ray-Ban, is
talking sales numbers: exponential and almost double than
comparable time last year.