Just posted to my Forbes column about why XR might not be dead after all … it may just be misunderstood.
For years, extended reality has been framed as a metaverse moonshot that didn’t quite land, especially after Meta poured tens of billions into Reality Labs and then pivoted to a “year of efficiency.” But what if all that investment didn’t fail … it just found a different payoff? According to Amy Peck of EndeavorXR, XR’s real long-term win may be robotics. The same spatial mapping, object tracking and environment reconstruction that let you place a virtual couch in your living room are now helping robots navigate warehouses, factories and real-world environments. In other words, AR is quietly becoming spatial intelligence infrastructure.
Meanwhile, companies like Nvidia are using VR-style digital twins to train robots in photorealistic simulations before they ever hit a factory floor. Thousands of accelerated simulations per day beat real-world trial and error every time. It may not look like Ready Player One — but it’s essential for scaling physical AI.
And for humans? Smart glasses are inching toward something even bigger: always-on intelligence augmentation. Meta’s Ray-Ban and Oakley collaborations are improving fast, and competitors like Google, Samsung and Apple are all circling lighter, more wearable AR devices. Translation, summaries, contextual prompts — even teleprompter features — hint at a future where digital context is layered continuously into daily life.
“I look at it as a spectrum of reality,” Peck told me. “We are going to be augmented to a certain degree, or not at all.”
XR may not have become the metaverse we were promised. But as the backbone of robotics and the foundation of always-on human augmentation, it may end up being far more consequential than anyone expected.