Hey — Alex here.
Two quick things, one this week and one next month.
I'll be at SIGGRAPH 2026 (July 19–22) — with three sessions
- Stage Presence: Design and Testing of a Virtual Rehearsal Room Toolset — Talk, Sunday July 19, 4:25pm PT, Room 403 B
- Powered by Gaussian Splats: From World Models to 3D Interactive Worlds — Hands-on course, Monday July 20, 3:30pm PT, Concourse Hall
- Virtual Theatre: Producing Live Theatre on Virtual Stages — Panel, Wednesday July 22, 1:00pm PT, Concourse Hall
If you're there, come say hi — hearing what you're building is my favorite part. Full session details here.
Live Unreal Engine classes are back — on a real schedule
Some of you know I taught 300+ sessions for Epic Games' partners. I'm bringing that back as public classes with a fixed weekly rhythm, starting with:
Unreal Foundations — Zero to Environment · 4 Wednesdays starting August 5. Editor & ecosystem → world building with Megascans & Nanite → Lumen & lighting → cameras & Movie Render Queue. You leave with a portfolio-ready cinematic render.
- Every class runs twice each Wednesday (10a–12p and 12:30–2:30p ET) so it works from Europe to the West Coast — attend either, recordings included.
- Thursday office hours every week — bring anything.
- $249 early-bird through July 29 ($299 after). Newsletter readers: use code NEWSLETTER20 at checkout for 20% off anything through July 29.
- Student or between jobs? Reply and I'll sort you a sliding-scale seat, no questions asked.
What should I teach next?
Month 2 candidates: Blueprints & interactivity, VR / Vision Pro, MetaHumans, archviz, AI-assisted Unreal workflows. Reply with the one you'd actually pay for — the most-requested topic becomes the September cohort.
What's cooking in the Lab
A few things in active development, hardware-verified and getting closer to a real release:
- Forage — an AI-first scout for the Fab/Marketplace packs you already own. You describe what you need ("castle with horses running around the gates"), it finds the 2–3 best-fit packs in your own library and installs the hero assets.
- UnRealityKit Bridge — UE simulation driving RealityKit rendering, for genuinely native Vision Pro apps built on Unreal logic.
- Pinchwork — a universal OpenXR hand-tracking template for Unreal, so you stop rebuilding the same hand-interaction rig per project.
None of these are for sale yet — the Lab has early-access signup for each.
The studio behind all of it
This site and the classes are the public side of Agile Lens, the NYC studio I co-founded — ten years of immersive work for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Four Seasons, NEOM, Samsung, and Royal Caribbean, among others. If your team needs XR, spatial computing, or AI-agent pipelines built (not just taught), that's the door: agilelens.com/contact. Agile Lens also runs its own newsletter — meetup nights, shows, demos, betas — separate from this one.
— Alex