Free livestream · All levels · 1 hour · Past session
Alex Coulombe Sitting & Talking
At a computer with a bunch of XR & AI stuff he's working on
with Alex Coulombe
Wed, Oct 7 · 11am–12pm ET
Streamed live on YouTube.
About this session
No class this week, so I went live from my desk and talked through whatever was on it. Meta Connect and what 45 minutes in the new Meta VR glasses was actually like, then a tour of what's running in the Lab right now: the XR simulator, Forage, Constellation, Scene Audit, RenderMan next to Unreal, and streaming Unreal into RealityKit with UnrealityKit. After that, a look back at nine weeks of classes, what membership gets you, the six classes coming up through November (two with guest instructors), what Agile Lens has been up to, and where I'm speaking next. The deck from the stream is public, so you can explore every tool and trailer at your own pace.
What we covered
This free livestream mixed an open question-and-answer session with a tour of the tools and plugins that come with membership, following nine weeks of classes at the training center. Alex Coulombe discussed recent extended-reality hardware he had tried and the stagecraft behind a mixed-reality demo on Apple Vision Pro, then demonstrated several in-house utilities covering asset sourcing, Blueprint graph layout, scene auditing, and streaming Unreal Engine scenes into RealityKit. The session closed with a look at the six classes scheduled through November and the two guest instructors teaching the next two.
- 01Reviewing the hardware characteristics and software constraints of the Meta virtual reality glasses shown at Meta Connect.
- 02Discussing why stagecraft and showmanship carry a mixed-reality demo on Apple Vision Pro as much as the underlying trick does.
- 03Demonstrating an XR simulator for testing gestures, hand tracking, and physics without a headset.
- 04Explaining Forage, an asset scout that searches an Unreal Engine library in plain English and imports only the dependencies a chosen asset needs.
- 05Presenting Blueprint Auto Layout, which restructures node graphs and generates comment blocks automatically.
- 06Outlining Scene Audit for diagnosing position and scale discrepancies in 3D scene data numerically rather than by eye.
- 07Streaming an Unreal Engine scene directly into RealityKit to inspect it across visionOS display modes while still editing.
- 08Summarizing export routes from Unreal Engine to RenderMan, OpenUSD, and glTF.
- 09Walking through what membership includes: live classes, Friday office hours, the recording library, the plugin lab, and a vote on what gets taught next.
- 10Previewing the six upcoming classes, including MetaHuman wardrobes, Lumen in Unreal Engine 5.8, creative AI workflows, and Gaussian splatting for virtual reality.
AI summary of the session recording's transcript — the recording itself is the source of truth.
