Google XR Director Juston Payne: Project Aura, Android XR, Lessons from Google Glass

This episode is sponsored by Your360 AI. Get 10% off through January 2026 at Your360.ai (your360.ai) with code: INSIDE.

Juston Payne is Google's Senior Director of Product Management for XR and the product mind behind Android XR and the newly announced Project Aura. He joins the AI Inside podcast to explain how Google plans to succeed where Google Glass fell short over a decade ago. We dig into why the smart glasses market today resembles the iPhone before the App Store existed, how Google's platform approach lowers the lift for developers, and why multimodal AI makes this the right moment for XR to take off. Juston also shares a personal story about his son navigating Rome with nothing but prototype glasses. Tune in for an essential conversation about where computing is headed next.

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CHAPTERS:

00:00:00 - Podcast begins

00:00:44 - Introducing Juston Payne, Google's Senior Director of Product Management for XR

00:02:13 - Why Google Sees XR as the Next Major Computing Platform

00:05:14 - Google's Ecosystem Advantage and the Developer Problem

00:09:22 - Gemini and XR: A Perfect Multimodal Pairing

00:13:17 - Google Maps and the AI Pipeline Powering Immersive Experiences

00:16:44 - The 10-Year-Old Navigating Rome with Prototype Glasses

00:18:54 - Juston Reveals His Original Google Glass Explorer Edition

00:21:59 - The Three Things Missing from Glass: Hardware, Platform, and AI

00:26:02 - Privacy, Cameras, and Cultural Acceptance

00:27:43 - The Xreal Partnership and Project Aura

00:33:04 - Thank you to Juston Payne for joining the AI Inside podcast

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