Mark Zuckerberg is head of the metaverse. The domain is his, claimed as captain of a ship called Meta with a crew of metamates he tosses overboard regularly by the thousands to periodically replace with new crew drawn into servitude clasped in golden handcuffs.

The crew’s conscience is of no value as their orders flow from above, their mouths gagged in cash to stop them from warning anyone under risk of professional suicide.

The Meta sails to Africa where subcontractors under camera surveillance label personal information fished from its clouds. Meta Ray-Ban glasses are confiscated in Saudi Arabia while Iran warns its citizens to delete WhatsApp. Zuckerberg seeks name tags to label the thinking of every living soul while his right hand, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Bosworth, protects the idea of capturing people for the metaverse after death.

Zuckerberg stuns his meals and speaks in his language on his terms with people he can use to spread his definition of reality. He promises new jobs to solve problems that get hidden by hiring instead of solved by focus, while distracting from the studied science of virtual reality and augmented reality.

The idea of the metaverse draws us away from the possibilities of creating in space with personal computers and into mindless consumption. It’s a place not made for the use of space by people but for Zuckerberg’s use of people across space. In Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse, you have no ownership and no rights, only terms of service.

Bosworth wrote a thread stating: “The metaverse is *not* just Horizon or VR. It’s the blending of the digital and physical that will define the next computing platform. We can experience it on VR and AR sure but we also see it on mobile platforms.”

Bosworth and Zuckerberg ripped an idea from fiction to apply to the science of VR and then they wonder why their idea didn’t take, tossing more people overboard when each course correction fails.

Bosworth failed to capitalize on VR by linking Facebook accounts, by forcing advertising into virtual spaces, by bringing in third party headsets, and by flooding the zone with generated slop. He’s moved his efforts on to capturing bodies and living quarters for their cloud while adjusting laws and culture to serve his ends.

What does Horizon Worlds on mobile have to do with “blending of the digital and physical”? What does taking on Fortnite and Roblox have to do with VR? Nothing. Does Bosworth feel the plank receding below him?

The metaverse only truly exists in your mind as an idea placed there by Zuckerberg and Bosworth. Even Neal Stephenson suggests “picking a different name” for an idea so obvious. Evict this word from your lexicon and it goes the way of NFTs, disappearing along with the nearly $1 billion stock grants promised to each of Zuckerberg’s top executives if they can make the idea inescapable. The metaverse is a domain where you own nothing because a king believes “Aut Zuck aut nihil”. If the choice is Zuck or nothing, choose nothing.

You can make infinite space in VR from nothing.

VR Headsets Are For Private Discovery

For decades now, VR headsets put the wind in the sails of explorers discovering new realms. Your presence is delivered there by wide field of view opaque optics and the embodied presence it provides. You can layer on mixed reality passed through cameras and may even spend a majority of your time in this merged space, but pure VR is always there underneath when you want it. Remember why you are here starting and ending in the privacy of your own home. You can start out on Jupiter and end in a place you’ve pulled straight from your imagination.

We go to VR to explore, escape and do impossible things. In VR, we take the weirdness in our minds and make space for one another to look around. This space is vast and ever-growing, and we need each other to call out good VR when we see it. Seek refuge there in open personal computers that don’t need your name, age, or your face to deliver what you seek.

There are free islands in Linux and Github and OpenXR and WebXR and Godot and Blender where you can trade time for resources. You can use these tools to fashion your own private vessel and choose when, or even if, you want to hoist a flag and announce your presence to explorers of a growing multiverse.

There are no kings in VR. There are only explorers making discoveries.

On March 28, 2016, the Rift started arriving with a gamepad in the box and on April 5 the SteamVR-powered Vive rolled out with full room-scale support and tracked controllers for direct hand interactions.

10 years later, more than four percent of SteamVR’s user base still play with the original Vive and Rift. You can characterize this percentage a lot of different ways, but to me it highlights the staying power of these original headsets when the guiding principles were to enable free exploration of VR for extended periods. These headsets haven’t been sold for many years and are still connected more than the Bigscreen Beyond. Together, they have more than double the use of Microsoft’s scattershot (and end of life’d) Windows Mixed Reality products.

Facebook and then Meta got a lot of things right in this decade — after all the Steam Frame’s controllers look a lot more like the Rift’s Touch controllers than they do the Vive wands — but Facebook’s purchase of Oculus gave new marching orders from Mark Zuckerberg to tens of thousands of employees every few months and they always tried to nudge people into staying inside their boundaries rather than exploring freely like these original headsets.

Rather than focusing on how malformed the VR market became over this decade as Mark Zuckerberg’s ideas took the focused idea of Oculus VR and turned it into Horizon Worlds on the underpowered Meta Quest, with a software link to good PC VR, I want to point you to a north star that’s guided many over this decade.

Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades, H3VR, is the creative playground of Anton Hand and his friends at RUST LTD. Never put on sale below its $19.99 price on April 5, 2016, the project has been reviewed more than 20,000 times in 10 years and remains rated overwhelmingly positive while still in early access.

On update 120 now and nearing 1.0 release, Hand amassed 110,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel with regular development logs breaking down his ideas. I encourage any young artists or developers exploring immersive creation out there to visit his channel and see the regularity of his updates and the progress he’s made grasping at the joy of deep physical interactions handling simulated mechanical objects.

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As you scroll back across more than 500 videos to the beginning, you can start to understand that nothing Zuckerberg and his middle managers brought to VR did anything for Hand except deliver him buyers who had to dig through multiple layers of Meta platform to find his work.

“H3VR is one-of-one. A singular concept led by one of the most dedicated and passionate developers working today,” Creature head Doug North Cook told Good VR. “Anton is proof that if you are passionate, generous, committed, and the best at what you do, there is a path to take. It is no easy path but I can’t imagine taking any other.”

I encourage you to read the whole thing, titled “My Prodigal Brainchild”, and then come back here as I pick apart some of the specifics where we agree and disagree.

There’s this:

When I was working at Magic Leap, and people asked me why I thought that was a good idea, I would ask the rhetorical question: “do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?” At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no.

Reader, I have changed my mind. Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles. Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces. Maybe this should have been obvious to me given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible.

There’s a lot to both agree and disagree with here. I agree that we will still have our hand terminals in 20 years, but there’s also a terrible assumption inherent to people promoting ideas like AR and XR and the Metaverse, and that’s the idea that headsets are to be worn 24/7 in public spaces.

Consider the difference between laptop and desktop computers. One never leaves your home and the other only comes out of a bag when you have a place to sit and work. Dedicated VR headsets as well as a VR-based spatial computer like Vision Pro are a mixture of both of these, featuring portability closer to a laptop with strong tethering to home use of a desktop. To Stephenson’s point about people “making their faces look as good as possible,” Apple Vision Pro solves this in two directions. First, you don’t care about making your face look as good as possible when you are at home. Second, you can focus on making your face look as good as possible exactly once for a face scan and then never worry about it again.

Phones can also be worn on a strap and if, or when, the equivalent of Mac Virtual Display arrives for iPhone, the phone can become a tracked input device while its screen turns off. You can swing an iPhone as a golf club, for example, or as a bat or tennis racket. Its MagSafe connector on back can lock into any number of accessories and Apple’s latest software already shows the way buttons and surfaces on its sides can interact with other devices as a remote control without even needing to glance at the screen. I use my phone all the time to turn down the volume on my TV, for example, without unlocking my device or looking at it.

This issue of public vs. private comes up again here:

When someone’s wearing a head-mounted display, on the other hand, you don’t know whether they are looking at you or not.

Likewise, when someone holds up their phone and aims it at you, it’s obvious that you are on camera. That’s not true in the case of glasses or goggles. So it’s creepy.

I take some pride in seeing Stephenson bring up an issue regarding the Meta Ray-Bans I mentioned multiple times in live podcasts for my previous employer about the social signaling of pulling out your iPhone to take a picture. Wired today also caught up to this trend toward pervert glasses:

And many of the top influencers in the Meta Ray-Ban scene, including Sayed Kaghazi (@itspolokid) and Cameron John (@rizzzcam), who have more than 3 million Instagram followers combined, are men prowling sun-soaked beaches and corridors of city nightlife so they can showcase their attempts to pick up women.

Creeps and perverts only affect others in public spaces. You neither need to feign eye contact nor make others uncomfortable with head-mounted cameras in the privacy of your own home.

There’s also this from Stephenson:

There is no business case for headsets any more.

I outlined this case pretty clearly just yesterday. People love simulation in a VR headset and pay tens of thousands of dollars to practice and train at their hobbies at home with huge opportunity available to make the experience easier, cheaper, and more comfortable.

From the iRacing website:

iRacing is pleased to share that through a collaboration with Apple and NVIDIA, the world’s premier motorsport simulation will be available on Apple Vision Pro later this spring with the release of visionOS 26.4 and NVIDIA’s CloudXR 6.0 streaming platform…

Apple Vision Pro delivers a uniquely immersive sim racing experience by seamlessly blending your racing rig with the virtual cockpit, aligning your physical steering wheel with the one in-game. iRacers see their physical hands on the wheel, producing an unparalleled experience that ensures racers remain visually connected to their racing rig while using Apple Vision Pro.

The announcement parallels an earlier one for X-Plane, a high-end flight simulator, with similar language in their announcement:

By leveraging image detection through ARKit, the sim can reliably track cockpit positions, allowing you to seamlessly merge the physical and digital worlds.

The announcements praise the involvement of both Apple and NVIDIA, even though Apple’s role is framed as secondary to NVIDIA’s. In that X-Plane announcement, for example, it indicates streaming from a “PC equipped with NVIDIA’s RTX GPU” and I had to confirm over email they meant a local device rather than a “cloud” one.

X-Plane is sold for Mac as well as PC, but it is not sold through the Mac App Store, and iRacing isn’t available for Mac at all. In either case, Apple isn’t profiting from the sale of some of the most expensive and well-loved simulation software about to be used with its spatial computing platform. That doesn’t sound very Apple-like, does it?

My original report about foveated streaming coming in visionOS 26.4 noted the split-rendering example Apple gave for this functionality:

“Foveated Streaming enables visionOS apps to display high-resolution, low-latency immersive content from streaming endpoints,” Apple’s documentation explains. “On Apple Vision Pro, Foveated Streaming allows you to display visionOS spatial content alongside streaming content. For example, a flight simulator app can render a cockpit using RealityKit, and stream a processor-intensive landscape from a remote computer to the device.”

This level of alignment between physical and virtual content, plus the technical complexity of split rendering, is practically unheard of in VR. Alignment typically requires extraordinary expense and time to deliver and most of the solutions fall short of what’s promised here without robust end-to-end platform support. To my knowledge, only Varjo has even attempted anything like this with the same degree of quality and immersion, and their headsets can be far more expensive than the Vision Pro.

Even close watchers of the VR industry don’t quite understand the implications of what Apple might do here for high-end simulation.

High Frame Rates Can Raise The Bar For Comfort In Simulation

Since 2016, with both the Rift and Vive headsets, 90 frames per second has been set as the bare minimum for comfort in VR.

Valve, with its open PC culture, didn’t restrict developers, instead allowing them to set their own minimum and recommend specifications for what the developer deems is a good experience. That’s changing with the coming Steam Frame, with Valve now requiring 90 frames per second for verification of comfort in standalone.

To enable Meta’s mad rush into standalone VR on cell phone-class chips from about 2019 — and to try to fork some developers away from PCs and Valve — the entire industry has been warped by Mark Zuckerberg’s spending into using a variety of tricks to produce comfortable frame rates for VR. Meta declares 72 FPS as the minimum rate on Quest standalone and also allows developers to deploy an array of solutions to essentially drop below that minimum, quite a bit in some instances, and then warp the scene or simulate missing frames to meet that lower rate for delivering a sense of comfort.

I call bullshit on the idea that the headaches people complain about from Quest headsets are entirely due to the weight and balance of the headset, or to the mismatch between simulated locomotion and physical movement. I think a substantial amount of fall-off in Quest usage is due to these tricks being deployed invisibly and frequently, whether in standalone or streaming from a PC, with the effect manifesting as a VR player simply feeling like shit after too much use.

Skip this paragraph if you’re squeamish, but it would be like being blindfolded and using a cheese grater to slice off bits of your favorite cheese. Sometimes, without warning and through no fault of your own that you cannot avoid, you cut off some of your hand too. You find yourself blinded to what you’ve done and taking a bite of bloody cheese, only to blame the cheese for tasting weird without knowing why any of this has happened. If that sounds like madness, it is, but it’s kind of like what happens when experiencing VR games that perform poorly, and I’m convinced it’s one of the reasons Meta noped out of its current position in VR so hard after cutting all these corners.

When I used the Galaxy XR headset running Android XR last year I was astounded to find that the entire operating system seemed to run, by default, at 72 FPS. I only experienced 90 for the first time when I installed Guy Godin’s Virtual Desktop and the difference was dramatic — I didn’t want to leave the app. As Valve’s Jeremy Selan noted when I visited Valve last year to try Steam Frame, “spatial resolution in VR is both a function of the spatial resolution of your displays at 2160, but also a function of frame rate. Because as you move your head with very small amounts of angle, the number of samples per second, essentially, combines spatially and temporally to give you that information.”

"That’s one of the reasons, in addition to gaming, that we’re so excited about those higher refresh rates,” Selan said of the device, which has an experimental mode running up to 144 Hz.

When I asked VR engineer Mark Schramm about his Recreation Room, he mentioned he drives and flies in VR with 96 gigabytes of RAM in a NVIDIA 5090 system with a DOF Reality Motion Rig and a quick-change system he built specifically to swap quickly between the two activities. He’s usually able to supersample with that rig, but noted that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 still struggles a bit with that. That’s insane too.

It should not cost the equivalent of a downpayment on a house to enjoy solid frame rates at super high resolutions in VR. The structural limits on the VR market are real due to bad decisions made by GPU makers and AI bros. It’s all somewhat invisible to practically everyone except the people who genuinely want to practice their favorite hobbies at home for many hours without developing a headache.

The simple environments of Beat Saber make it one of the few games that can often run at much higher frame rates with extra comfort. Most assume gameplay is the reason for that title’s success, but I’d argue it’s also the high frame rates.

Apple’s Opportunity

Apple can bring both iRacing and X-Plane into the Mac App Store and carve off their standard cut of sales by solving these problems with Apple Silicon and split rendering.

That paragraph above quoted from Apple notes local headset rendering of a cockpit but you can apply the same idea to the interior of a car. This can do two key things for people experiencing a high-end simulation in VR. RealityKit may be able to render that cockpit or car at the headset’s base frame rate, potentially up to 120 FPS on the M5 Vision Pro. That in and of itself would be a dramatic win for VR comfort, while the content itself provides a continuous framing to the user helping to ground them. Vignetting, for example, is an option many games deploy to reduce discomfort in stick-based movement systems, artificially reducing what you see to a small circle. This reduces how much of your field of vision receives a mismatch from what your body feels. The car’s cabin or the plane’s cockpit can do the same thing automatically in every moment.

I noted in my podcast with Cubism and Laser Dance developer Thomas Van Bouwel that his work in this medium is at two ends of the spectrum when it comes to the idea of not using artificial locomotion. Laser Dance sees you physically moving through a room to avoid a laser maze cut to the size of your environment while Cubism is a spatial toy kind of like a Rubik’s Cube that keeps you seated the entire time. Cubism would be right at home in visionOS while Laser Dance on a Vision Pro might not work so well because the system simply isn’t optimized for low latency walk-around mixed reality.

Mark Zuckerberg called mixed reality like he deployed in Quest 3 “the better product period” in 2024 while the number of developers who embraced the idea, like Van Bouwel has, are vanishingly small. I propose that’s because Zuckerberg was likely reading from a script when he said that rather than from his personal desire to experience something like what Schramm’s rig provides in supreme comfort at more reasonable prices.

“It’s of course common sense that the higher the title and the power, the more pressure there is for immediate returns as their guide, focused more on financials and less so on the actual research hours into understanding this medium for themselves,” long-time VR and AR developer Steve Lukas wrote.

Now imagine the new M5 MacBook Pro carrying as much RAM as Schramm packed into his PC, or a new model Mac Studio, carrying that same chipset and sucking down power to turn into rendering the view you see when you lean over in your comfortable jet’s cockpit to look out the window at supersonic speeds.

The opportunity is so large here Apple could single-handedly crash the AI economy with demand for comfortable and more affordable local simulation like this, especially if it could combine such a robust offering with a mainline Vision Air headset that drops weight and cost. Of course, you can always turn on DLSS 5 and let your senses swallow NVIDIA’s hallucinations instead. Is that what most people want?

Me? Now’s a good time to put my subscribe button down there so you can maybe help me start sequestering funds to build a local sim rig that’s genuinely high frame rate, high resolution, and comfortable.

I was gutted and then volcanic. Almost 600 of you joined me. I wrote what I felt and over 80,000 people read it. Then Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth does an Instagram AMA and casually mentions they’ve decided to keep it “for the foreseeable future”.

I don’t think this is cynical, but it is unusual. I think someone inside that company flinched. I think somebody still has a conscience in there, even if the response appears performative too. That flinch matters. But a flinch is not repair.

Whoever inside Meta felt something when hundreds of XR professionals lit up in horror, I am speaking directly to you right now: take another step. And another. Because walking back a kill date on an Instagram story is not accountability. It’s the first inch of a mile you haven’t started walking yet.

I am not grateful for a stay of execution. And I am not trying to burn down whatever nerve is still alive inside Meta. I am here to say: prove it. Because right now, “for the foreseeable future” dropped casually on an Instagram story could mean you’re listening. Or it could mean you’ll do this again, quieter, when the world is not watching. Show us which one it is.

This feels like psychological torture to the people who put their hearts into building places in Horizon Worlds. Stop it.

Let me tell you who you are harming.

Please note that throughout this piece I am linking to entire worlds people made in Horizon which you can visit. These sites are actual places in VR and they will become dead links in the years to come if Meta kills Horizon Worlds after the future their leadership is able to foresee.

Lacey is an amputee. Years ago, in a community I designed called the Horizon Creator Community, he built an interactive world called “My Journey”, a walkthrough of his below-knee amputation, his dozens of surgeries, and his dream of navigating a kayak someday if he could get himself walking. He showed up cognitively compromised. He struggled for months to learn the creator tools. But with community support, over time, he learned. And then he kept going. He collaborated with sound artists, environmental artists, and community members to build sacred geometry galleries, fantastical Star Wars-meets-Willy Wonka space rides of playful, trippy, healing experiences. He built The L.I.T. Gallery, a world synthesizing art, sound, and community into something that cannot exist on a flat screen.

Bizerka identifies as having a severe seizure disorder. She also came through the HCC, where she connected with supportive creators and built “Salvage”, an experiential journey through the underground railroad from the perspective of enslaved people. She persisted in this effort despite waves of criticism from people in both the wider Black and white communities who considered her work too serious for VR. She later built a world describing her seizure condition, which brought the community closer to understanding her and supporting her. Like Lacey, she showed up compromised, struggled for months to learn the tools, and with community support eventually learned enough to build her own waves, manifesting her dreams and bringing all kinds of people together in a common cause.

Both of these creators, two of hundreds I supported and nurtured in their first community and building experiences, started by describing their pain. They ended by creating worlds that healed other people. That is what VR community does when it works. That is what Meta announced it was demolishing two days ago. And that is what “for the foreseeable future” on an Instagram story is supposed to fix.

It doesn’t.

Here’s what making amends actually looks like. I built a framework called AMENDS to help communities repair harm. I train leaders in it. BridgeMakers Cooperative, my community in VRChat, has a wisdom world where people can pick up these cards around a fire and talk through how they’re going to do better. This already exists, in VR, on a platform that’s still standing. Meta, here’s one more chance to do the move where everyone wins:

A, Acknowledge what happened. Not “we’re separating platforms for focus.” Say what you did. You told creators their life’s dreams and thousand of hours building community and environments would be inaccessible in 90 days. You did this through an email and forum post. You did this after years of telling them to build, invest, trust, and belong.

M, Map the impact. Creators like Lacey and Bizerka found a medium where their bodies and conditions weren’t barriers. Communities that used VR for healing, connection, and cultural expression. People who can’t even locate their own creations in your broken search engine. Don’t tell us what you’re “focused on.” Tell us you understand what you broke.

E, Express understanding. Not “we heard your feedback.” Show that you understand why announcing the demolition of embodied spaces where people healed is not a product update. It is institutional harm. The fact that you didn’t know that before you made decisions and posted it is the problem.

N, Name what needs repair. Specifically:

• Fix your search engine. Creators cannot find their own worlds. That has been broken and that is unacceptable before, during, and after any transition.

• Repair and maintain the basic creator tools so the people who built your platform for you can continue to access and maintain their work.

• Give creators full ability to export and move their worlds, complete and intact, to other applications. Unwall the gardens before you abandon them.

• Release the application to the community as a cooperative open-source project, the way Tilt Brush turned into immortality for its creators by using open source to become, through community, MultiBrush and Open Brush, a VR art tool that thrives because Google let the community steward it. If you don’t want to steward what creators built, let the creators steward it themselves. BridgeMakers Cooperative would volunteer to help coordinate this effort.

• Give creators a seat at the table where these decisions get made. Not a community forum where they find out after.

• Issue a public apology taking responsibility for the egregious treatment of creator content, for breaking promises, and for the psychological safety you manufactured to get creators to trust you after years of broken commitments. Not a product update. Not an Instagram story. An apology.

• Share a plan of action. With timelines. With names attached. With accountability built in.

D, Demonstrate change. Don’t reverse course only when people get loud. Change the structures that made this possible. How are creator investments protected going forward? What happens when you pivot again in six months? Show us the policy, not a response to press. Not an Instagram story.

S, Stay in the conversation. This is the one Meta has never done. You don’t get to announce, retreat, drop a casual “for now” on an Instagram AMA, and go quiet. The people you harmed are still here. The conversation doesn’t end when the news cycle does.

Meta has clearly shown they never understood the value or the responsibility of what they built and lured thousands to build with them. This is so much worse than Spark AR and Horizon Workrooms because of the nature of self-made immersive worlds, the hype of competitions that lured people in, the careers and lives that trusted Meta and then were tossed aside by a company that is too big to care and too clueless to understand what it held.

This is wrong. Do better.

To everyone reading this, I am asking you to act.

If you work in XR, in tech, in community building, in policy, in journalism, in any position where your voice carries weight, do not let Meta turn a stay of execution into a redemption story.

Demand the apology. Demand the plan. Demand export and open release.

This is a moment where a company that spent tens of billions of dollars, and convinced thousands of creators to pour their lives into a platform, is now treating their work as disposable. They need to hear from people that this is not acceptable.

Creators didn’t build in Horizon Worlds because of Meta. They built despite Meta. And they deserve more than a company that only listens when it’s scared.

Perfection is a myth, but accountability is not. Being people-first demands more humanity than this kind of treatment.

This is not the same as another app closing. Let me show you what Meta was holding.

TechCrunch reported the reversal and opened with this: the walk-back “should come as a huge relief to, like, five people”.

Here are some of those “five people”:

Alcoholics Anonymous groups have been running VR meetings in Horizon Worlds for years. An organizer said that hundreds of people have been put on the road to recovery through these meetings. When AltspaceVR shut down at Microsoft, those meetings migrated and they were about to be displaced again. People in active recovery just had their meeting space threatened with a 90-day eviction notice.

Living Hope VR Church holds weekly Sunday services, Bible study, and a live podcast. For people facing marginalization in the physical world, this church became a refuge.

HouseCall VR is an immersive healthcare education hub where patients could learn about their conditions through interactive exhibits.

Jeremy and Joy Duncan built “Joy in the Morning,” a talk show voted World of the Year and Best Podcast/Talk Show World in 2023 by Meta’s own community.

Karen Stritzinger, ex-Meta/Oculus developer, founder of Old Hara Studios, and environmental justice organizer, built gamified worlds on ecological conservation and climate solutions, including “Urban Coffee Farm” demonstrating urban farming and the 15-minute city, and collaborated with the University of Oregon on “Virtual Excursions for Science Learning,” an educational plankton research simulation. She is now working to help creators find ways to preserve and port their worlds. This was not a hobby. This was research infrastructure.

A former Meta employee wrote in the comments of my original post: “Our team was piloting VR-enabled, data-driven health and wellbeing programs that decreased stress, increased health and movement, and provided virtual community spaces for our Metamates. It was all killed in the Year of Efficiency.”

Logan Johnston, a former Meta Scaled Partnerships Lead for Creator Economy, wrote publicly: “I can barely find the words. I was an advocate for years for Meta’s mission. Now I feel like I’ve personally let a lot of creators down.”

These are more than a handful of people. These are recovery groups, churches, healthcare hubs, climate research sandboxes, cultural spaces, disability communities, talk shows, art galleries, and healing environments. This was not just a hobby space or a social hangout to them. This was a sandbox for trying to solve humanity’s problems. Thousands of hours spent by highly educated, deeply skilled professionals collaborating and dreaming and problem-solving some of the hardest situations facing us, using the most powerful communication medium ever built. And Meta just told all of them their work had a kill date, then told them on an Instagram story to be grateful it was delayed.

This is not the same as Spark AR shutting down. This is not the same as Horizon Workrooms. The soul of Supernatural left when its coaches were laid off and the software was put in maintenance mode, but the place still exists and wasn’t given an expiration date. This is not like game studios being shuttered, or hundreds of Reality Labs employees being cut. Each of those was a wound. But this, the elimination of embodied spaces where people healed, recovered, worshipped, researched, found community, and built entire lives, this is different. VR is not a screen. You cannot flatten these experiences onto a phone and call it a transition or a focusing move.

This is erasure.

If you leave a comment on social media, or directly under this article, know that real people share in your experience, will see your words, and will be affected by them. The Internet is large, but it is not inhuman or without love, and words have meaning that touch people you may never see but may know you anyway.

It’s become clear now more than ever: The future of XR is up to us. Who is “us”? Well… whoever’s still here. Whoever is still playing the game of “making XR happen” at any level. The January layoff was a big blow dealt just months ago, and last week’s talks at GDC coupled with the announced shutdown of Horizon Worlds for VR cemented it.

If you’re still in XR, you’re either waiting to get laid off or you’re still here fighting for something. But fighting for what, and how do we make this industry succeed?

2016 - 2025: Follow the Leaders

12 years ago I thought VR was interesting and the more I learned, the more I wanted to participate. All I wanted to do was participate. I had no intention of managing, leading, or even innovating. I just wanted to play and be a part of it.

A lot of us trusted in platform leadership to guide the path, to lead the way, to show us how to take VR mainstream and thrive. That’s why seeing follow-up commentary around “GDC’s State of VR has taught us the path forward” crushed me.

How XR Leadership Guidance Actually Works

I’ve been on the inside of XR platforms and I’ve been on the outside. I know how corporate budgets work, how off-sites work and how initiatives are time-bound in annual allocations.

Walk with me. In 2025, Meta said Horizon Worlds was the path to unlock VR, and committed $50 million to it. That was the 2025 thesis, in year 10 of the Oculus from Rift’s launch, and yesterday they said “That thesis was wrong” by shutting it down as far as VR is concerned. So this is 2026, year 11, and the State of VR isn’t a report on what’s unlocked VR, it’s just “annual thesis number 11”, yet to be proven but declared prominently as a well-researched, proven fact.

The guidance of how adults will adopt was not “the answer”, it’s the next thesis provided to management that they have a year to try to prove until 2027’s GDC. I mean, it would be amazing to say that someone in charge has the answers that we need. It’s a leadership stance that we need. But what I learned in my years working at and with platforms, is what you don’t see, and that is that everyone in charge is looking to someone else for the answers. That’s why so many of these “answers” sound like they’re taken from another XR platform’s still unproven thesis.

It’s the nature of the industry, and especially a by-product of people in charge having clocked fewer headset hours than the people on the ground, but by having more authority and title seniority, it creates blindspots. It’s of course common sense that the higher the title and the power, the more pressure there is for immediate returns as their guide, focused more on financials and less so on the actual research hours into understanding this medium *for themselves*. As a result, the vast majority of XR platform leadership is building what they think “other people will want”.

The XR platform leader that I would put the most trust and faith in to move this industry would be the one using the product on a regular basis for their own true benefit. I would want to see that person being excited for others to be able to one day do what they’re already able to do. The closest I’ve seen of that in the last 5 years is Mark Zuckerberg at Meta Connect running with his Oakleys after the keynote. That air of “I love this, I’m using it, and I’m using it in a way that’s authentic and not just a stage demo, and I can’t wait for you to love this too.”

I’ve spent enough time with XR Dev Rel leaders that have said “We don’t know what will work, the developers will, so we’ll look to them for the killer app.” But when those platforms then met with developers, the devs would ask in turn “What do you want us to be building?” rightfully inquiring the creators of said devices. Additional companies in the supply chain would also ask what content should be built, and it would go round and round until an unknown quantity (in the form of an announced but not yet shipped headset) got pointed to and selected as XR’s “savior”, most notably in 2023 with the anticipation and subsequent announcement of the Apple Vision Pro.

For months the industry buzz was “Apple will solve it for us” until the Vision Pro’s market share became a reality. Very reminiscent of the Silicon Valley episode of being “pre-revenue”. As soon as that buzz wore off, it was time to say “Android XR will do it.” Until that unknown quantity became known, the talking heads would say why Google had all the answers, but now the market share has the talking heads saying “It’s going to be Steam Frame”. Why? Because it’s an unknown quantity with aspirations, until it isn’t.

All of this to say: don’t look elsewhere for the answers to XR. Look within. If you have a strong thesis, it may be just as good, if not better, than the big budget corporation in charge, because we are all just people trying to figure it out.

Why Words Alone Will Not Win the Day

I know enough to know that if you’re reading this, you’re likely not in charge of an XR platform. Those people are too busy and likely looking for another XR outsider with limited headset experience to come save the day, even higher probability if they have a strong consulting background or sales track record. But if for some reason you are in charge of an XR platform, you’re also likely not to take any action from this, and that’s well-justified, because your metrics are majority financial and this here is just a statement that isn’t.

So this message is for the VR community, the ones making content. Today with where we are, it’s super important to know that if you want to be a part of it, you have two choices: service the VR market, or expand it. “Service it” means to make the same kind of content that’s already out there. Another zombie shooter. A rhythm game with a twist. An escape room with generative AI. And be prepared for it to sell to a fraction of the existing market. Remember, even another Batman or another Deadpool would be an extension of an already discarded thesis.

Great Responsibility

The other option: is to not just service, but to expand the market. And to do it using the tools that the platforms have given us, which to be honest, do represent great power. If we want the space to grow, it’s no longer enough for us to merely participate. The novelty momentum in VR is gone, and just following the next platform’s new thesis is once again not a guaranteed path to success. Even 100 games hitting $1m is also sadly *not* a rallying cry when billions have been put into this market.

So if you’re building in VR just to service the market, stop here. Have fun, hope it works out for you.

But if you take up the responsibility to expand it:

• Don’t build for other people. Build for you, and for people like you.

• Build something that you truly enjoy. If you don’t enjoy it, stop or pivot.

• Build something that other people enjoy. If they don’t enjoy it, fix it, stop, or pivot.

• Form a thesis of why your project matters. Find the pillars that you’re building to, and be very declarative about your motivations.

• Build something accessible. If people can’t understand it or can’t use it, keep iterating and find solutions. Tip: some people prefer controllers, and some prefer hands. Serve them both.

• Build something that you believe will change the market in ways that haven’t been done before. If you don’t want that responsibility, then you’re servicing the existing market and can stop here.

• Build the most important thing that you believe this industry needs, and demonstrate your thesis with enough of a financial return that’s so significant that the platforms can’t ignore you.

It’s long past time to leave XR’s future success solely to the people in charge of the platforms. They’ve done their part and given us amazing tools. Now WE the builders have to grow it if we want it to succeed and reawaken investment from the companies that can take it further.

AI is Not Enough

“And that’s why we’re investing in AI”...

Artificial Intelligence algorithms are accelerants and are limited to amplifying what they’re trained on. They can do what we teach it to do, faster and more thoroughly, but AI cannot solve the XR problem on its own because it hasn’t yet been solved by humans, and AI cannot put on the headsets with a physical human perspective. It needs human innovation coming from the people that get it, understand it, use it, love it, and know how to build it, to rally and make the things that the big platforms have all missed, whatever it may be.

Remember Why We’re Here

I want to trace this rallying cry back to 2014, when Facebook bought Oculus. For those of us that believe in VR, I want to trace it back to the moment you first believed in its future.

For many of us, you believed because you saw the potential. You saw what it was like to have an infinite computing space, not limited to 1080p and now 4k monitor pixels, not limited to one rectangle, but moreso not limited to 2d inputs. Full freedom of sight and interaction provided limitless potential in what we could do, in how we could experience the world, how we could transform and who we could do that with. And so Facebook spent the billions, and we pivoted our entire careers.

Today some would have us believe that the “ultimate potential of VR” is now somehow realized with AI-powered smartglasses. While those sales figures are impressive, does that vision line up with what we imagined when we first believed in VR? Were all of us wrong, or is that immersive vision simply not yet realized?

Whoever’s left out there, it’s time to get serious and take the ball. The platforms have done their part, it’s time to step up and do ours. No more relying on another executive’s annual thesis, let’s build our own with everything that we uniquely understand, team up where we can, and let’s be loud about it. Together, let’s make mainstream immersive a reality.

The problem with this guidance is that Meta can’t see past its next dramatic shift in strategy, which tends to be less than a year away and as quick as six months. As use of Horizon Worlds diminishes in time will they not just pick a new date for end of life?

Original article published March 17 appears below.

Meta today sent an email putting structure to what was already said in February.

Namely, that Horizon Worlds is dead in VR from June 15, 2026:

Starting June 15, 2026, you will no longer be able to build, publish or update VR worlds. In addition, you will no longer be able to access Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest headsets. After this date, you can continue to enjoy worlds on the Meta Horizon mobile app.

This change is part of our focus on mobile development, bringing new experiences to even more people. Your Meta Quest headset and other VR apps are unaffected by this change.

We’re grateful for your creativity and participation in Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest.

On a forum page for announcements Meta adds:

After June 15, you can jump into all your favorite mobile-optimized worlds on the Meta Horizon mobile app.

Meta Horizon Hyperscape Capture (Beta): By March 24, 2026, viewing Hyperscape captures is moving out of Horizon Worlds. Your existing captures will remain viewable within the Hyperscape Capture (Beta) app and the companion Preview app, which are available in your Quest app library. You can continue capturing new Hyperscapes, but sharing, inviting, and co-experiencing Hyperscapes with others will no longer be supported.

Reinventing The Metaverse

What Meta is moving toward is capturing your physical spaces and full bodies for AI analysis and value extraction. To match what Apple has done with the Vision Pro, and still maintain Andrew Bosworth’s strategy of training AI and keeping you on their service even in death, I expect Meta to seed people they can manage with early versions of a future headset that will allow users to scan both themselves and their physical environments into their servers for virtual visits.

Meta’s demonstrated pattern is to use influencers and desperate journalists to brand language and ideas across interviews. The make-or-break moment for the company’s entire effort in VR is not in Horizon Worlds, but when Mark Zuckerberg or Andrew Bosworth can appear as scans of themselves in cyberspace alongside people they’ve captured to help them hype up their efforts and manage perception. I expect them to do this by hosting interviews, giving tours, and attempting to make the “metaverse” mean something new after the abject failure of Horizon Worlds.

My heart goes out to the creators who built the first versions of Horizon Worlds from primitive shapes during the global pandemic. While suffering from isolation and a threat to their existence in a way executives at Facebook never experienced, those creators expressed themselves, discovered one another, and gave the Quest platform a chance despite knowing that this day was likely coming. I spoke today with one of the organizers of an Alcoholics Anonymous group who estimates hundreds if not thousands of people were helped by meetups in Horizon Worlds protected by the veil of total anonymity. Today, like so many others before them, they experienced how Meta treats people as users rather than humans.

If there are any words you remember of my commentary, please let them be these:

Before you scan your body or your room into places on Mark Zuckerberg’s servers, you better be sure any “export” and “delete” buttons actually function the way you expect them to. That uncomfortable feeling you have in your stomach when you read Meta’s carefully worded privacy policy, which gives the illusion of choice and control when it does neither, is your future self screaming at you to think more critically. If you don’t listen to that voice, your ghost may be doomed to train AI and interact as a drone in Zuckerberg’s new metaverse.

In both the Vision Pro and MacBook Pro the devices carry the 5th generation of Apple’s own silicon in its highest-end portable products. MacBook Pro laptops today range $1700 to $7349 varied by screen size and quality, data storage, and memory.

Here are the price ranges of portable personal computers carrying Apple silicon:

• MacBook Pro - $1700-$7350

• MacBook Air - $1100-$2900

• MacBook Neo - $600-$700

What do you want to do with your computer? How long do you expect it to do what you want? Where do you expect to take it? Answering those questions is how buying decisions are made and Apple’s product designs differentiate in style, size, and functionality to help those decisions get made. Do you need 2 terabytes of storage or 96 gigabytes of RAM to complete your projects and run the software you want? Or will 256 gigabytes of storage and 8 gigabytes of RAM do the job?

Now add the physical dimensions of those device categories to these comparisons:

Here are some of the takeaways from these comparisons:

• The Pro line features maximum customizability to service the widely varying needs of people who require extreme computing power and are willing to deal with extra weight in exchange for features like extraordinary battery life or beefing the system up with RAM for the most demanding tasks.

• The Air line differentiates by being significantly lighter while still including some upgradeability in storage, chipset, and memory. The Air begins at a much lower price while the highest priced MacBook Air is a fraction of the highest priced Pro.

• The new Neo line starts at an extraordinarily low price. The weight it carries is exactly the same as the Air starting with less RAM and a lower starting point for storage.

Accessing The Untapped Sim & VR Gaming Market

Apple headset adoption is held back by the following three factors in this order:

• Weight

• Content

• Cost

Cost and weight are closely related in headset design. Content is addressed largely through additional software and experiences accessible in Apple headsets, but also by lowering cost.

The more people who can afford the hardware the larger the potential market. VR software faces the age-old chicken and egg problem that plagued immersive content for decades, because content won’t be made for an audience that isn’t there and an audience won’t buy VR hardware without content to enjoy.

Interest in building for immersive hardware is at one of its lowest points because Meta spent the last half decade stunting the market with the underpowered Quest platform and slop of Horizon Worlds layered on top, with both layers pushing high-end simulations from a PC into a tertiary role, whether Microsoft Flight Simulator or Half-Life: Alyx. For example, multiple developers found themselves over the last five years optimizing the Quest edition of their game at the cost of the PC version to leave both audiences unsatisfied with the end product — Quest users with a barely performant game lacking dynamic lighting with PC VR users encountering bugs that were not addressed before release.

Vision products launched by co-opting the existing useful iPad app library as a background surface for the incubation of spatial ideas from developers. Apple today prepares foveated streaming for high-end simulation with huge opportunity available in the adoption of standardized spatial controllers.

After more than two years of VisionOS, Apple’s platform is ready to invite a lot of top tier immersive content into its ecosystem in standalone, streaming and with combinations of the two.

What’s holding back its arrival is weight and cost.

Vision Extension: Pro To Air To Neo

Laptops and Apple headsets divide components into two pieces. The battery in a Mac laptop and an Apple Vision headset are both held in spots where the weight isn’t noticed during use. From here, how does Apple differentiate future devices from the Pro line?

To cut weight and differentiate, a hypothetical Vision Air headset could still use the M5 processors and drop the following components from a mid-tier product:

• EyeSight: The external display on Vision Pro provides the illusion of eyes to connect with people in the room and help with capturing Persona avatars. Neither of those features are necessary in a product designed for movie watching or long-term solo simulation.

• Face tracking and Persona avatars: Apple Vision products can still feature the same security and core interaction features with only eye tracking. FaceTime audio calls are the ideal way to connect with others and share your view when long-term immersion in a space is the ultimate goal.

• Built-in audio: If the loss of weight and benefits of better headset balance can be found to increase overall use, then AirPods, HomePods, iPhones worn on a strap, and even streaming PCs or Macs can all be co-opted as audio output. Built in audio in Vision Pro is a nice-to-have feature, but not a necessary one for a hypothetical scenario where your PC is sending bass to a vibrating racing seat with 7 audio channels of booming sound positioned around the room. Bigscreen Beyond, for example, makes this same design choice. An included USB-C port on the side of the head instead of a $300 developer strap can be used for simple wired earbuds. Even better, a low latency connection to AirPods can deliver fantastic audio while making space for components to move off the front of the face.

Everything else about the Vision Pro experience is something I wouldn’t want to see compromised. The OLED displays that self-adjust to eye distance with eye tracking provide the very core of Apple’s interaction scheme for Vision products and, combined with its high resolutions, are what allow a product like Retrocade from Resolution Games to keep players immersed across long play sessions.

Using the Vision Pro’s display architecture as the foundation of a second headset line offered at lower price can sell in higher volume and be more comfortable to wear for longer periods. Now we can begin to work out from here what Pro, Air and Neo Vision products might entail for spatial computing over multiple products and another decade of improvements:

• Vision Pro: From $3500 to $10000 can focus on spatial media creation from apps to videos to performance capture through on-board sensors, with upgrade options possible for display improvements, processors, and storage. I would spend a large portion of my income on varifocal optics and super-vision as upgrades in Apple ultra high-end spatial computers.

• Vision Air: From $2000 to $3200 can focus on immersive entertainment and app media creation with upgrade options in processors and storage.

• Vision Neo: From $1000 to $2000 can focus on mass market spatial computing with an alternative display and processor architecture and limited upgrade options in storage.

The task for Apple ahead is the same as with iPods, then iPhones, and now MacBooks. Take gains from vertical integration of its technologies and hone in on what people want at prices that make sense. Apple’s AirPods filter everything you hear and Vision products filter what you see. The Pro’s imperfect open ear solution makes for a complete product and spatial computer but it’s a tremendous amount of weight and cost that makes it impossible for the vast majority of developers to justify a purchase. That can begin to change with a second product line that distributes less weight and costs less.

I’ve written, and then deleted, too many words dreaming of interactions between Steam Link and SharePlay that would enable everything from true LAN parties to co-watching movie parties and karaoke nights in headsets from different manufacturers. All that still seems pretty far away because there’s too much to protect and too much ground to gain by becoming the main provider of core technologies in spatial computing. Put another way, it’s too early for too much cooperation. There are, however, areas where clear gains can be made by both Valve and Apple.

Steam Controllers In Apple Stores

The new Steam Controller would be totally at home inside an Apple Store. Attaching the wireless transmitter and charging puck to a Mac would only make it better to spend time playing games with Apple hardware.

Doesn’t this seem like it belongs in an Apple Store?

Steam Frame controllers could be sold as a pair inside Apple Stores too. The PlayStation VR2 controllers have been sold out from Apple for months, meaning that the large ringed devices which aren’t as portable as the headset itself cannot even be purchased on their own to play games developers might be making for Apple. The ringless Steam Frame controllers, meanwhile, are small enough to transport in the side-carry Belkin bag inside which I carry the Muse pen.

“Apple doesn’t care about games” is only true until it isn’t anymore. And the space for software here is much bigger than “games” — it is about precision input and haptic feedback for both flat games and simulation in VR.

Meta’s controllers for the Quest ecosystem are attached to everything from putters to 3D-printed ping pong paddles to model guns to track the objects and bring them into software. You are showing bias and a lack of imagination if you think Apple’s disinterest in gaming as a subset of personal computing extends to the high-end simulation systems that train pilots and other professionals today. With X-Plane on the way and enthusiasts ready to shell out thousands of dollars for motion simulation rigs like the one SUPERHOT VR developer Mark Schramm has in his living room, this market is ripe for Apple to pick fruit by simply making high-end simulation a little easier to experience.

One way to do that is to supplant Quest controllers with Steam Frame controllers as a semi-standardized tracked object equivalent to a gamepad but more useful for scenarios like attaching to an object you want to track.

Given the absence of Sony’s controllers in Apple stores, the bottom line here is one of two things is very likely true. Either Apple put PlayStation VR2 controllers in stores to allow developers who purchased Vision Pro to prepare for next steps, or Apple is done with VR and that’s why the controllers are out of stock. If you believe the latter, why did Apple add an M5 chip to the Vision Pro in late 2025 and build a new operating system to just to abandon it after shipping a Pro device in one category? If you believe the former, do you think it likely Apple is going to make its own tracked controllers? That would be interesting to see, but I propose that with Apple operating as a protective layer between developers and users for hand tracking and eye tracking the company doesn’t really need to “own” gamepad input. They want to be the provider of games you use your eyes and hands to control and that leaves space for Valve, Nintendo, and other gamepad makers to sell their wares inside Apple stores to accessorize Apple spatial computers while still profiting from core interaction with the headset.

Apple Subscriptions In Linux

Apple Music and Apple TV subscription services would both improve the experience of working with Linux computers while simultaneously feeding more eyeballs and ears and revenue to Apple and the artists who make content locked inside those services.

It is not in the interests of Valve or Apple or their paying customers to encourage a process of seeking APKs to install from untrusted sources on devices like Steam Frame. Trust is likely one of the reasons Steam hosts the latest version of its Steam Link APK directly on its support site. People using an Android-based device who don’t want to, or can’t, use Google Play for some reason have a trusted place to look to find the software and gain access to their Steam streaming game library. Google is looking to verify APK developers starting this month for pretty much the same reason.

This brings us to Flatpaks — a distribution system for applications in Linux that, when uninstalled, returns the operating system to the way it was before installation. Valve is a big believer in Flatpaks and, if Apple would test those waters with its protected content, it would have a surface outside Google and Microsoft’s grips to deliver revenue-generating services onto any Linux-based device. How exactly Apple makes its digital rights management schemes work inside Linux is not my problem to solve, but when I’m in Steam Frame I don’t want to go looking for bootleg Android apps in order to listen to Apple Music or watch Apple TV while playing games.

I should be able to just install those services to my Steam Frame and, ideally, play a flat game from Steam while watching a streaming movie from Apple. That’s essentially the inverse of the experience on Apple Vision Pro today streaming a game from Steam while watching a downloaded movie from Apple. For those who might look at this and argue that nobody actually needs this kind of multitasking, I question whether you are being honest about your media habits using multiple traditional flat screens in the physical world in tandem with one another.

Chipping Away At Microsoft & Google

What I’m describing here are simultaneous wins for both open and closed computing that can be won by more collaboration between Apple and Valve. Open wins by flatpaking apps for use in spatial computers without the involvement of Microsoft or Google or Meta by routing around their platforms, puts quality content in more places, and helps popularize a more open method for distribution. Closed wins by putting an unbreakable digital rights management shell around digital content that you lose access to the moment you stop paying for the subscription.

Meta exits the Quest 3 era with little more than 1 million subscribers paying for a monthly fee to access the best places in VR. Knowing Meta’s history in this space, I expect them to allow games that don’t see many users to disappear from the subscription while lowering the cost to subscribe and subsidizing future development and long-term exclusivity agreements from the apps on the service that see the highest engagement. After Google swiped the HorizonOS third-party headset market from underneath Meta — with AndroidXR the likeliest platform now to be used by Sony or Nintendo in making VR headset consoles — the Horizon+ subscription service is the only thing Meta can used as leverage to try and force itself into a data-gathering layer at the base of VR and spatial computing.

Meta’s pullback here was predictable by both Apple and Valve. Meta made product after product that was too heavy, too low-powered, and too disconnected from the things you actually need and want when you’re wearing a headset. Apple and Valve are filling the void with their own products that are still walled off from one another in some ways. By not capitalizing on this moment through cooperation, they leave an opening for Meta to regroup itself as a much leaner effort that can still try to establish itself as a foundational layer inside their machines.

The year was 2014 and PlayStation VR wasn’t yet named. Instead, Sony introduced the forthcoming headset as Project Morpheus. MacRumors today reported that Apple leaked the name MacBook Neo (Model A3404) in a regulatory filing ahead of the laptop’s expected announcement on Wednesday.

Unhinged Speculation From Good VR

The low-cost “MacBook Neo” device is expected to marry the chipsets used in iPhone to the form factor of a laptop.

While Chromebooks might be the target for the new product category near-term, long-term Apple’s software is beginning to blur the lines between its various platforms. When you’re surrounded by several Apple devices and invoke Siri, for instance, software quickly resolves which device responds to your query. On the other end, when using an Apple Vision Pro headset with Mac Virtual Display pulled up inside of it to develop a volumetric app, you can iterate extremely fast by telling Xcode to deploy each new build directly to the headset. My M3 MacBook constrained by 8 GB of RAM, for instance, would take many minutes to accomplish the same task on its own inside of the onboard simulator of visionOS. Using just the laptop alone slows iteration time and the ability to fix bugs and test, and I also really can’t do anything else on the laptop while it devotes its resources to the development task.

Meanwhile, iPad apps are the foundation of Apple’s window strategy inside its first spatial computer and iPhone Mirroring makes it easy to operate your phone from a Mac even when it charges out of reach nearby. It is almost like Apple needs a “Neo” architecture for everything it does to form the foundations in spatial computing for decades to come. One could easily argue that aligning Apple’s iPhone chipsets with its ambitions in spatial computing could yield the company the biggest wins with economies of scale.

I’ve enjoyed the heavy Vision Pro headset for the last two years with features like realistic Persona avatars (that beat Meta to the punch on the same technology) and an external passthrough display that is helpful for that setup, as well as for connecting people in the same physical environment to the person in headset. Many have assumed that the features of the device represent a developer kit and minimum viable feature set for Apple’s future, with a long slow slog ahead to mass market economics and adoption.

A much lower cost headset, however, that doesn’t feature the external display and doesn’t necessarily include Persona avatars could still stream high end simulation games from a nearby Mac or PC using ALVR, and could still float iPad games and interact with iPhone Mirroring with the same gaze-pinch interface as Vision Pro.

The PlayStation VR2 controllers are sold out in Apple Stores after shipping in just enough numbers to supply developers with tracked controllers they could use to develop their ideas for the future of Apple headsets.

If Valve can’t ship Steam Frame on time because unnamed companies bought up all the memory and storage for their product plans, both the ringless Steam Frame Controllers and Steam Controller would fit right in as a complement to my probably imaginary Apple Vision Neo product in Apple Stores.

That hellish drive could last anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours, depending on traffic, and I was trying to apply my best strategy to the worst of the 91 Freeway by finishing off the last bit of the day from my work laptop at home. I remember exactly where I was on that stretch of road when my editor at the Register called to say what crossed the newswires on March 25, 2014.

Mark Zuckerberg purchased Oculus VR for $2 billion.

The local startup I put on the front page of the business section of the Register in 2012 had become, two years later, the foundation of Zuckerberg’s ambition to build a computing platform that could rival those made by Google, Apple, and Microsoft. I’d have a writeup for the Register as soon as I could finish the drive, call a few people, log into the content management system, and take a few focused minutes to write my thoughts.

Below are three paragraphs I published for my front-page story in the Register on March 27, 2014:

“Jeff Norris, a computer scientist at NASA who has experimented with the Rift, thinks virtual reality will some day let people experience a Mars landing in a much different way than they did with TV and the first moon landing.”

“Cameras that see in 3D will map the Mars surface landscape and beam it back to Earth. Shortly after, people wearing goggles on Earth could stand in their living rooms and accompany a person in a space suit as they descend a ladder and leave a dusty footprint on the red planet.”

“In a demo Oculus shows off called ‘Titans of Space,’ you crane your neck upward and Jupiter towers above you, larger than anything you’ve ever seen. The scale shifts and Jupiter shrinks to just a small globe floating in front of a sea of yellow stretching as far as you can see in every direction. That’s how big the sun is in comparison.”

A New Mode Of Transportation

When I wear Vision Pro in my home I typically teleport to two places in virtual reality I cannot reach by any other means. I’ve even started mixing these places to get the best of both. The first place is the small moon Amalthea orbiting Jupiter and the second is an arcade set in the year 1989.

I’ve also worn Vision Pro in a cafe to play a digital board game without passing a device back and forth. I reluctantly pulled the headset out at the airport, and put AirPods in, to tune out the music playing over the terminal loudspeakers that was cutting out for five seconds every 20 seconds. I tuned out the discomfort of economy class, as someone over 6 feet, by wearing it through my flights. I wore a Quest instead of Vision Pro for a bus ride from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley only because I was on my way to Meta Connect and taking my preferred system to Zuckerberg’s event would seem a little rude.

In visionOS on Jupiter’s moon, I have nearly fallen asleep only to be startled awake by the light of a distant sun hitting my eyelids when it pops out from behind the planet. No real bother, in VR I can stop time altogether. In the absence of light on an OLED VR display, Jupiter appears like a black hole. I find the backdrop of a sun eclipsed behind a planet to be an unmatchable place for a cinema or arcade. When the sun shines on the side of the planet we can see, only patience might notice the clouds of the gas giant slowly churning. Speeding up time helps make that movement easier to see.

The newly released arcade is called Retrocade and it was made by Resolution Games for Apple Arcade. Retrocade’s architecture is measured as gigabytes of texture and light wrapped around kilobytes of gameplay producing a warm vibe with realistic reflections inside the arcade cabinets. The year 1989 is conveyed by narration in the arcade to set expectations and scope. Pac-Man, Galaga, Space Invaders and more classics are playable in the arcade and Apple even hid the original Russian version of Tetris in a secret back room.

In Retrocade, you don’t have to stand at any of the machines to play the games. You can if you want the added immersion, but it is easier to take the games out of the arcade and back out to Amalthea instead. I played Pac-Man for half an hour with my cat sleeping on my chest and his purring body between me and my game. I never stopped seeing the subtle yellow reflection of Pac-Man and his chasers visible even in the simulated metal rim around the virtual screen.

I’ve never known focus and escapism like I’ve found in an Apple virtual environment.

Forgoing Wear, Tear, Traffic, Tickets, Parking & Insurance For My Privilege

Presence delivered from a wide field of view optical path in virtual reality is the canvas upon which all software and experience can display. Whether it takes 5 more years or 15 more years or 50 more years to become mainstream, VR is the foundation of personal computing in the 21st century and it is the core concept enabling spatial computing from Apple.

My purchase of Apple’s first VR headset and abandonment of my car to afford it is a choice car brains cannot comprehend. That’s ok. I know the sense of freedom, exploration and escape ingrained by a century of car culture. I experienced that rite of passage at age 16 at the turn of the century, and then I spent more than 20 years wearing and tearing my way across the United States in assets that, by definition, become more dangerous the more miles they’re used.

I will never again be drawn into a speed trap nor will I need to drive defensively. I am giving up the privilege of spending precious hours of my limited life stuck in traffic and driving to or from my place of employment. I am abandoning the cost of paying insurance on the risk to my fellow Americans inherent to manual physical travel in a heavy rolling metal box. One of the Oculus founders was killed in 2013 in the crosswalk near my office in Santa Ana by a human-driven car. I don’t think about the statistics that show how dangerous cars are, I just think about what that skeptical voice might have said when Zuckerberg showed up to buy Oculus.

Nothing about what I’ve said here changes the reality that, for some, owning a human-driven vehicle means a locked door, roof over your head and a new start somewhere else when every other thing in a life has blown apart. VR can’t replace that kind of escape hatch and I am not suggesting others follow my particular path. I am not telling you to spend $3,500 to have this experience or to get rid of your car to have it.

But if you want to disagree with my overall premise here you are going to have to disagree with Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook too.

Traveling The Internet Instead Of The Interstate

In 2026, Meta, Google, Valve, Apple and Bigscreen all ship the same fundamental architecture for the display of software in a place people go via presence. The larger trend is the same as it has been since last decade, and all these companies race to the very same place — virtual reality.

In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg wrote internally to his lieutenants that “our vision is that VR / AR will be the next major computing platform after mobile in about 10 years.” In 2024, at year 9 of that 10 year timeline, Apple ended its car project and shipped a VR headset instead.

When it comes to Zuckerberg, consider the words he said in 2017 at Oculus Connect 4. I have listened to everything he says to developers at these events. His speech then, speaking for roughly 15 minutes, was the last time he had his hand directly on the pulse of the people who truly believe in this technology.

“If you can’t think of any way that your reality can be better, then you’re not thinking hard enough. You know? Take your work. How long is your commute every single day? Now I don’t know anyone who sits in traffic and thinks to themselves, man, right here, this is the best that reality can be. Now a lot of people have ideas on how to make transportation better. Alright, self-driving cars, hyperloops, and don’t get me wrong I love all of that stuff, but it’s 2017 and the biggest trend in transportation is that it’s a lot easier to move bits around than atoms.”

That same year Jeff Norris left NASA. Today, he works as Senior Director on apps and content in the Vision Products Group at Apple. He’s almost certainly had a hand in creating these places I love to travel in my headset and could never get to by car.

Here’s what he told me then:

“One of the things we’re investigating is the use of immersive displays for looking at data returned from spacecraft. We’re looking at virtual reality technology as a way for our scientists and engineers to better understand the environment around a spacecraft and then better control that spacecraft.”

“But we’re also looking at these technologies as a way to share the journey of these missions with the public. The fact that [inexpensive devices like the Rift] are becoming more accessible to a broader audience helps both those goals.”

“It’s now conceivable to put these kinds of devices in the hands of a whole mission science team. It’s also possible for us to imagine in the not too distant future millions of people in the public having these kinds of devices and being able to consume this data along with us.”

“If we put humans on Mars someday, we should have millions of people there with them standing beside them in this holodeck-like way. In 1969 the television was the most engaging and effective medium for bringing the world along. It was the perfect choice at the time. It’s not the perfect choice now.”

My body is ready. My headset is ready. The streaming and capture technology is ready.

The structures of society are not.

The Dream Of A Holodeck

I sold my car in 2024 to afford the purchase of an Apple Vision Pro. Today, that headset remains the most expensive thing I own. With the housing market the way it is and journalism the way it is, a headset may always be the most expensive thing I own.

I am a trekkie. My fandom for Star Trek colors everything I have ever done. The future I want my children to live inside is not in Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, but in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek and experiences found on occasion in a Holodeck or Recreation Room.

Apple today makes PADDs, tricorders, universal translators, and if the folding iPhone doesn’t flip out like a Star Trek communicator I hope reviews of the hardware call out the failure.

In Vision Pro, I got my Holodeck.

CAVE Versus HMD

When I look back at my path of reporting from 2012 to 2026 there is one article I have to point to that might help contextualize the discovery of virtual reality better and help in conceptualizing what’s changing here from science fiction to fact.

There is at least one other delivery mechanism for VR other than an enclosed HMD. I visited one such facility at Disney’s Imagineering offices in 2012 in connection with the launch of Cars Land. Decision-makers at Disney could walk around a room and see the sight lines of their planned construction using projectors pointed at the walls, 3D glasses, and a hat tracking head movements. These sorts of facilities are called CAVEs and they existed only in expensive research labs, just like VR headsets, up to 2012.

If it could ever be economical to install a projector array in a room capable of beaming images at high frame rates with views matched to head movements for the enjoyment of a single person, we would have, instead of head-mounted displays, a holodeck that very closely resembles Star Trek’s depiction of virtual reality. Such a facility would also likely need to be enormous to do redirected walking of the sort imagined by the show. And, after all that, you’d still likely need to wear some form of shutter glasses to see stereoscopic 3D and none of this would solve for haptics.

For me, experiencing VR in that CAVE just a few months before donning a duct-taped proof-of-concept for an inexpensive head-mounted VR display showed me something important about time scales here. A true holodeck of Star Trek’s sort may still be more than 100 years away. It is an infeasible science fiction future technology like physical matter transportation and warp drive. What the Rift prototype showed, in contrast to this, was that a path to consumer virtual reality was not on that kind of timescale.

Today, I carry my holodeck in a Belkin shoulder bag almost everywhere, and I still shake my head when I read the following sentences from The Verge’s review of Vision Pro in 2024:

“But the shocking thing is that Apple may have inadvertently revealed that some of these core ideas are actually dead ends — that they can’t ever be executed well enough to become mainstream. This is the best video passthrough headset ever made, and that might mean camera-based mixed reality passthrough could just be a road to where.”

No, Vision Pro’s heavy design and the minimum viable “mixed reality passthrough” contained therein was necessary to close the experiential gap between what is done in a CAVE and what can be layered on top of presence in a wide field of view VR headset.

The dial on Vision Pro and the cutout of my arms by visionOS means I go from a purely physical environment in my view to a mixed reality space with augmented reality windows and objects I believe float in my room because of the presence found in the wide field of view optics. Apple engineered the technology of a CAVE into a augmented virtuality headset.

Apple’s engineers are so competitive in this fight for the future of computing that, even though they figured out how to put AR on top of VR, correcting for the failed optical path of Magic Leap and HoloLens, their efforts stand to gain much by simply not correcting the record at places like The Verge or anybody else. It enables their competition to hire grifters taking paychecks for managing metaphorical visions built on wordplay and branding rather than applying decades of research and NASA engineering to the science of product development.

I’ll end this piece about selling my car to travel sometimes in VR instead with one of the most important questions I’ve ever asked.

“A lot of people get confused that VR headsets are a transition until AR glasses. Are we going to have both in the future?”

In 2022, I met Michael Abrash at Meta’s research offices. He was hired in 2014 from Valve to become Meta’s top researcher. Whatever strategy Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew Bosworth attempt to employ by hyping AI and their “unshippable” Orion AR glasses must align with his answer.

I don’t listen to Kent’s podcasts often. It’s just not my preferred way of digesting information while I also spend my days trying to directly contact some of the same people he speaks with. I respect the effort and focus in his work, though, and not many people ask journalists their thoughts because we tend to guard them as part of the job. But when Kent asks me to speak with him I tend to say yes and unload on him with a fair bit of pent up emotion sitting underneath the surface of my work.

I also produced a weekly show in front of a live YouTube audience with my former colleagues at UploadVR called the VR Download. The conversations we had were driven partially by what the hosts brought to the table but just as important there were the live comments we saw rolling in from the audience as we were talking. As long as people were respectful, it was easy to respond to their ideas, go off on silly or strange tangents, or respond to questions from new people who had just discovered the long path VR continues to be on after decades in research labs.

I’ve heard from several people missing my voice on the VR Download and wanted to reassure people that I will soon be broadcasting again. Until I can put the episodes together, though, you can listen to four conversations between myself and Kent Bye that can provide some deep insight into my last seven years covering the VR market.

I’ve listed the conversations below chronologically with notable comments from each discussion:

2019: The Reveal Of Valve Index During Facebook’s VR Event

Episode 782:

I'm sitting there at the Starbucks, then an email comes in and it says the embargo has changed from May 1st to April 30th at 10 a.m. Now, that was two hours ago, so that was the very start of the F8 keynote. It's hard to describe my reaction as a journalist to all these things, because I try to be objective. I try to be balanced. I try to be fair. But there's still emotional reactions to major news breaking. And so just knowing that Valve was going to time their announcement to the exact start of Facebook's announcements. I get giddy as a journalist. I don't know. I can't wait to see what the Internet does. It's going to be bloody. I hate saying both of those things. I know there's going to be so much debate and talk and I know that everything that these two companies are about to announce is going to drive the conversation for the next nine months, years. And it's just, I've worked so hard to try to be on the front lines of all this and not misrepresent what anyone's doing. And at the same time, you know, you're wondering, does Facebook know what I know? Like, I mean, Valve clearly knows that stuff is coming from Facebook, but does Facebook know? And it's an exciting time for me personally. And I feel weird sharing that, but you bring it out of me, Kent. Because I have this demeanor of trying to be neutral all the time. And something of this magnitude, it's hard. And there's a lot of things to balance. I don't care about this technology relative to people, right? I care about people. I think the people who are making this technology are doing something from their hearts.

2023: Apple Vision Pro’s Announcement And First Public Demo

Episode 1218:

“I had messaged every person I knew that had gone and gotten sucked up by the Apple mothership prior to that. So I was in all their LinkedIn messages, their DM chat, trying to say, ‘Hey, if you can get me on the list, please do so.' I would love to be there when Apple announces its thing,’ knowing that none of them can reply to me or even give me a hint of anything. I don't know how I got on the list. But yeah, I was in my mom's house in Bentonville, Arkansas, like my son's last day of school. He was just getting ready for his summer vacation. And I'm walking around preparing for my own personal travel that I've got coming up. And I looked down at my phone and the email is there that you've been invited to Apple's. My son was born the day I accepted the job to work at Upload. And he saw me jump through the ceiling, almost, in a way that he's never seen me jump. Like you say, he's almost eight years old, and he saw a moment of joy. in me that he has never seen in his life and he flat out said I've never seen you act like that but it's it was meaningful and I explained it to him that I've been I've been more or less working towards this moment his entire life and it feels weird to frame it that way but it is essentially true.

2024: Meta’s Unshippable Orion Glasses

Episode 1476:

Star Trek was my childhood TV show in the holodeck. Transporters, going to strange new worlds was always my model in my mind of the future I wanted to see for everyone. They had Geordi LaForge, the blind man on the ship, as the engineer and can see better than everyone. And it made a lot of sense to me as the future we should all work for. And so when I saw the Rift DK2 and those guys outlined for me the wide field of view and the tracking and all of it being within arm's reach, I was going back to my editors saying, I need to write more. And they were all rolling their eyes at me for a little while. And the satisfaction I felt when... The satisfaction and the pit in my stomach was a very strange feeling to feel when 2014 rolled around and Facebook bought them because it's like... an instantaneous realization that the future you've imagined and went out on a limb for is actually going to happen and here we are a decade later on from that and I haven't been proven wrong yet.

And:

I'm so excited for the future of this technology and the things it will bring people. At the same time, I'm trying to put labels and ideas and concepts in people's minds that help them realize all the bad things are coming with the good things. VRChat is not a safe place for children. Rec Room is not a safe place for children. You go on there with voice chat, you're not safe as a child. And I'm saying that as a journalist who doesn't say that in a lot of places. Like, I haven't said that. I have to be balanced and objective. But like, we took the playgrounds away from children And then we gave them digital playgrounds with adults role-playing as children. And that's not okay. And how do I balance that with the excitement for the new game that's coming out, right? Drones are killing people from head-mounted displays in certain parts of the world right now. That's upsetting. To know that the same fundamental technology that is bringing all this joy to so many people is also killing people. And you can argue that FPV Viewer is not a VR headset, but I mean, I saw a lot of people driving drones in their quests over the last three weeks as soon as they added HDMI Link in.

2026: Concerns About AI Authorship In News And Going Independent

Episode 1709:

It's always about the quality of the content, the words that you're putting on the page. But that's what they need. They need to fill the site. They need to keep those regular viewers coming back. And I mean, that's my 10-year struggle here at UploadVR, to go from this freelancer to the editor-in-chief who's managing content from multiple staffers who are on different continents, different time zones, etc. Yeah, so an exhausting journey when I look back on it of just struggling, struggling, struggling to raise up voices and places inside VR that are going to be around for a while. Like, it's wild to think about in retrospect, things like Echo, right? I'm live inside of virtual reality on Upload VR's YouTube channel when Meta announces they're closing down virtual reality when they announce Echo Arena is being shut down. And so there's live video out there of me reacting to one of the biggest failures, one of the biggest misses, bad decisions that Meta has made over the years to shut down one of the places in virtual reality that people wanted to go in Oculus headsets. Come off of my journey and go back to Meta's journey. I see so many mistakes over the years. But think about that as a journalist watching it. I'm investing time and effort and resources into covering Echo Arena because, holy crap, it's got a community. There's real people loving this thing. So it goes to the top of our list of coverage. Whenever anything happens in Echo Arena, we're going to be on it. And then Meta just comes around one day and says, Echo Arena is an idea of the past. We're done. And so all that investment in trying to become experts in that community, connections in that community, be the site that becomes the place that Echo Arena fans want to come read We couldn't do that. It all dies because of a decision out of our control. And so there's such a small example here of how our coverage decisions were always influenced by the elephant in the room of meta. They closed down a whole area of VR that we were interested and excited to cover. And now we're going to cover what they put in its place.

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What’s most intriguing is the idea that the framework might lead to a new kind of experience that uses a combination of local and remote rendering.

“Foveated Streaming enables visionOS apps to display high-resolution, low-latency immersive content from streaming endpoints,” Apple’s documentation explains. “On Apple Vision Pro, Foveated Streaming allows you to display visionOS spatial content alongside streaming content. For example, a flight simulator app can render a cockpit using RealityKit, and stream a processor-intensive landscape from a remote computer to the device.”

That sounds great. I want more.

Taking Off A Gravity Glove To Grab iPhone

What if your iPhone in hand was rendered as “spatial content” in RealityKit instead of seen with low resolution passthrough?

In a hypothetical scenario playing Half-Life: Alyx or Elite Dangerous streaming from a nearby PC over Wi-Fi, a call on the phone would vibrate in my pocket just like anywhere else. Instead of popping up in my vision and killing immersion, I would have the choice to ignore the phone or reach into my pocket.

PlayStation VR2 controllers would function like gloves in this scenario. Take off your Gravity Glove by just dropping one of the controllers to hang from its wrist strap, and then pull out iPhone instead. Alyx’s hand would be replaced with your actual hand holding an iPhone in City 17, with clarity for the screen far higher than passthrough.

Finish interacting with reality by putting the iPhone away and grabbing your controller again.

If Valve would consider selling Steam Frame controllers in Apple stores, separate to its headset, Vision Pro buyers would have a more portable option for haptic hands than Sony’s ringed solution.

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs.

And:

Meta is exploring who should be recognizable through the technology, two of the people said. Possible options include recognizing people a user knows because they are connected on a Meta platform, and identifying people whom the user may not know but who have a public account on a Meta site like Instagram.

The one time I met Mark Zuckerberg he asked the room of reporters the first question, seeking their thoughts on the Quest Pro we all just tried. I gathered from that interaction Zuckerberg is always gathering data to inform his decisions and, in fact, that is likely your only value to him.

“What’s your name?”

It’s a very human question, isn’t it? Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth has so far removed him from normal humans that he wastes his time and money re-engineering our most basic interactions.

Once discovered, we should be able to teleport back near-instantaneously. In some headsets and experiences, you can leave the device sleeping and then just wake it and you’re back online in your space. This, however, is the exception rather than the rule. How often have you picked up your headset to find its battery drained of charge and turned off? How often have you stared at the saggy Meta logo in your headset before you clear the gate-check and are, only then, offered your choice of destination?

A charged headset should sit there from afar and say “the world your friend sent you is ready to visit” or, without friends, something like “Organism by Dr Morro is ready in VRChat”. Then you put on your headset and you are there. A friend’s headset could say “your friend is in VRChat world Organism right now” and then they put on the headset and are there too.

Top tier spaces like VRChat, Bigscreen, Walkabout Mini Golf, Golf+, Figmin XR, RealVR Fishing, Eleven Table Tennis, No Man’s Sky and even Microsoft Flight Simulator could all function this way. We should teleport instantaneously to these destinations instead of commuting to them. Instead, we travel through platforms like a shell game being played in front of us with our destination hidden inside one of the layers.

I enunciated some of this in my recent conversation with Kent Bye and, as I’ve talked with Jeff Basladynski of VR Villa about LAN parties and started to mess with WinlatorXR, this issue has further crystallized.

Four or eight Steam Frame headsets booting directly to a networked flatscreen version of Quake or Halo should be playable by gamepad or tracked controllers on simulated 70-inch screens. No PC towers needed, no tables, no table-mounted displays, no instruction required and no discomfort from simulated movement in 3D. This would functionally be the same as enjoying a LAN party, except wearing HMDs to arrange oneself into novel positions instead of around physical monitors. How about a Kill Cam that breaks through your virtual screen so you can see your real best friend react the moment your virtual bullet kills their character in game?

The bring-your-own computer QuakeCon each summer should have a whole section of players reclined on beach chairs in HMDs, their PCs humming underneath their seat as they compete with the player sat next to them over a local area network.

You want this. I want this. VR needs this to succeed. Platforms just need to get out of the way to make it happen. You do not need to go through a store or gift shop to enjoy good VR.

The latest example can be found in the app used to manage Meta’s VR hardware. Last year, I used this app to watch my 10-year-old son playing in Meta VR via a “watch live” button, and this year I can’t make that button work no matter how many times I press it. Instead of that fundamental feature working — the ability to look in on my child in a VR headset purchased from Meta — Meta appears to be taking this tragic misadventure of copying Fortnite and Roblox into its purest form.

Golden Gloves VR, for example, is a newly released boxing game on Quest headsets but the “world” you see in my screenshot below is not that paid destination. It is a free sampler-like copycat world built in tools managed by Meta from the same people who make the full game “On Quest”.

There seems still to be some version of the future where Mark Zuckerberg thinks enough children might want to play not-Fortnite or not-Roblox or not-Minecraft on their phone as a taster for full virtual reality.

I just don’t see it.

If or when “worlds” with a lowercase w fail, the screws will turn further on extracting value for AI from all other behavior found inside a Meta account.

With our recent discussions about accelerating our work in VR / AR, I thought it would be useful to articulate what goals I hope we accomplish with our investment.

Our vision is that VR / AR will be the next major computing platform after mobile in about 10 years.

Why is Zuckerberg having staff think about 10 years from now instead of how to improve the experience in VR headsets next quarter through constant regular value production?

It can be even more ubiquitous than mobile - especially once we reach AR - since you can always have it on. It’s more natural than mobile since it uses our normal human visual and gestural systems. It can even be more economical, because once you have a good VR / AR system, you no longer need to buy phones or TV’s or many other physical objects - they can just become apps in a digital store.

Apple enters the market at year 9 of this 10 year timeline with a VR headset that does AR incredibly well and uses a battery pack shaped very similarly to iPhone while designed to replace TVs.

Beyond the sheer value we can deliver to humanity by accelerating and shaping the development of this technology, we have three primary business goals: strategic, brand and financial.

How does “shaping” this technology deliver “sheer value”? That word does too much work here.

The strategic goal is clearest. We are vulnerable on mobile to Google and Apple because they make major mobile platforms. We would like a stronger strategic position in the next wave of computing. We can achieve this only by building both a major platform as well as key apps.

Whatever definition Zuckerberg and his lieutenants have for “major” and “key” helps contextualize moves like attaching Facebook accounts to Quest activity, killing Echo Arena and shuttering game studios.

I will discuss the main elements of the platform and key apps further below, but for now keep in mind that we need to succeed in building both a major platform and key apps to improve our strategic position on the next platform. If we only build key apps but not the platform, we will remain in our current position. If we only build the platform but not the key apps, we may be in a worse position. We need to build both.

It is hard to imagine phrasing that would create a less focused management structure underneath Zuckerberg’s vision than framing the plan in this way. Again, why is this not about regularly stacking value for people excited to explore what it means to wear a VR headset from Oculus?

From a timing perspective, we are better off the sooner the next platform becomes ubiquitous and the shorter the time we exist in a primarily mobile world dominated by Google and Apple. The shorter this time, the less our community is vulnerable to the actions of others. Therefore, our goal is not only to win in VR / AR, but also to accelerate its arrival. This is part of my rationale for acquiring companies and increasing investment in them sooner rather than waiting until later to derisk them further. By accelerating this space, we are derisking our vulnerability on mobile.

The users of services are called “humans” and when a bunch of them get together they form a community. “The actions of others” in a business environment is called competition, so Zuckerberg is suggesting here that competition might make people “vulnerable” to leaving him, which is how abusers think.

The brand goal is also simple. The weakest element of our brand is innovation, which is a vulnerable position for us as a technology company dependent on recruiting the best engineers to build the future. Having an innovative brand will pay dividends not only in recruiting but therefore across all of our products and other efforts as well.

The idea that Zuckerberg sees the weakest part of the brand as innovation rather than trust and providing actual value to users buying a computer highlights one of the biggest failures in this strategy. The Oculus Rift in 2016 used multiple cameras to do proper tracking while competition at Valve shipped lasers that were architecturally the reversed concept. Whether they actively thought about it or not, Vive users visited VR without their bodies seen by cameras. Now Zuckerberg ships a camera on every device just hoping people will learn to need computer vision in their lives everywhere they go. But where is the value in that? And what is the effect on trust?

An innovative brand comes from building tangible new products. Our work in VR / AR is the best example we have. Our core social networking work is no longer new, Internet.org is extending something rather than inventing it, and Al is not yet tangible. We can do more to tell our story in each of these areas, but succeeding in VR / AR has the most innovation potential in the next 5-10 years. Of course we need to succeed in VR/ AR to gain any of these brand benefits, but if we do, this will be very valuable.

This is one of the most salient points of this document. How did this insight that ““our core social networking work is no longer new” get lost by 2020 when their “tangible new product” got forcibly linked to Facebook accounts? Who decided to link the part of the brand in freefall, that Zuckerberg recognized was a problem in 2015, to the freshest part of the company?

The financial goal is the most specific and this is where I’ll discuss which aspects of the VR / AR ecosystem we want to open up and which aspects we expect to profit from.

Now we’re getting to the good stuff.

I think you can divide the ecosystem into three major parts: apps / experiences, platform services and hardware / systems. In my vision of ubiquitous VR / AR, these are listed in order of importance (although it’s worth noting that Apple has built the world’s most valuable company with a high-end vision by reversing that order).

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Echo Arena. Beat Saber. Supernatural. How did Zuckerberg’s lieutenants forget the focused thinking associated with the word “ubiquitous” while acquiring software that asked people to carry around a headset and two controllers? Zuckerberg has teams working on hand and eye tracking throughout this entire journey, but they only ship one eye tracking headset in 12 years. I demoed eye tracking in 2017 and never wanted to use a headset again without the feature. Headsets without eye tracking are arguably a dead end now that we have hindsight.

The key apps are what you’d expect: social communication and media consumption, especially immersive video. Gaming is critical but is more hits driven and ephemeral, so owning the key games seems less important than simply making sure they exist on our platform. I expect everyone will use social communication and media consumption tools, and that we’ll build a large business if we are successful in these spaces. We will need a large investment and dedicated strategy to build the best services in these spaces. For now though, I’ll just assert that building social services is our core competence, so l’ll save elaborating further on that for another day.

Oof. The idea that Zuckerberg could not figure out how to align social services with this strategy document suggests he hadn’t any real solid plan for how to benefit from the discovery of affordable consumer virtual reality.

The platform vision is around key services that many apps use: identity, content and avatar marketplace, app distribution store, ads, payments and other social functionality.

Bigscreen was unable to set up a video rental store on Quest headsets due to the Facebook’s need for “payments”. Why make competition instead of partners out of passionate developers? When it comes to ads, you can also imagine someone high up at Facebook thinking “the real world has ads so why wouldn’t VR have them” without realizing that one of the chief benefits of putting the headset on would be to escape the constant creep of advertising.

These services share the common properties of network effects, scarcity and therefore monetization potential. The more developers who use our content marketplace or app store or payments system, the better they become and the more effectively we can make money.

This is what you say to staff if you want them always trying to kill good things by arguing that there’s greater “monetization potential” elsewhere.

It’s worth noting a few things. First, these platform services should be cross platform.

Valve kept Oculus out of Steam and Apple policies changed to stop apps tracking behavior.

Most of the services can be offered on iOS, Android, on desktop, etc. On Android, we can both offer an app store and offer many of these services to apps distributed through Play - if we app switch to our preloaded marketplace for purchases, we won’t even have to pay Google’s 30% rev share. Second, this platform definition is not actually an OS in the technical sense. In modern OSes, however, most of the value comes from advantaging the OS provider’s own platform services on the devices where its OS is installed. I think our primary platform strategy should not be focusing on building a fully independent OS, but owning these core platform services across all systems. This will be challenging as OS providers will try to push us out, but if we build superior services and provide things OSes need (eg Unity support), then we have a good shot at success.

Within a few paragraphs of reading why Facebook wouldn’t allow Bigscreen to make a profit from video rentals on Quest, we see Zuckerberg make clear he’s waging a very specific battle against Apple, Microsoft, and Google for the very same funds.

The last part of the ecosystem is hardware / systems. This category includes all of the core technology required to make VR / AR work but that has little sustainable business value independently: the headsets, controllers, vision tracking, low-level linux and graphics APls. These pieces all need to be very good for the overall ecosystem to be viable. For example, smartphones needed good touch screens, battery management, radio technology, etc. But aside from brand, patent enforcement and building teams that are consistently far ahead of everyone else, this is the most difficult part of the ecosystem to build into a large business. Even when companies do succeed, no single hardware company gains ubiquity like our vision requires us to do with apps.

Arranging hardware / systems as the least important of the three priorities is why Meta shipped Oculus Rift, Rift S, Go, Quest 1, 2, 3, and 3S all targeting specific prices rather than minimum viable consumer experiences. He even acknowledges that “vision tracking” is key here, and yet it is absent from all those devices.

Developing hardware and low-level systems is very important for a few reasons. It helps us accelerate and influence the development of VR / AR. It gives us a significant opportunity to integer our platform services across all systems (not just ours). And if we do consistently great work, it could potentially become an important revenue driver like it has for Apple.

Giving hardware teams this little ground to stand on with an “if” here is why we have Framework laptops in 2026 running Linux and they aren’t made by Facebook.

Our overall vision for the space is that we will be completely ubiquitous in killer apps, have very strong coverage in platform services (like Google has with Android) and will be strong enough in hardware and systems to at a minimum support our platform services goals, and at best be a business itself.

This is the ultimate failure in Meta’s strategy thus far and the likeliest reason for a massive pull back at the start of 2026. In 2022, I visited Meta’s research offices and saw their full body codec avatars and wrote that they were likely VR’s killer app. That Apple shipped Vision Pro with hyperrealistic avatars before Meta could ship anything like it at all suggests Apple agrees with me. Pretty much anytime Meta does layoffs it is in service of hiring more expensive people to do more expensive things elsewhere. So getting full-body hyper-realistic avatars to be “ubiquitous” after Apple set itself up for a multi-year lead here raises serious questions about exactly how Meta is able to compete in VR going forward. Would they seed the full body codec avatar technology in early access kits to influencers to hype it ahead of release?

Zuckerberg’s document should probably have ended here, but it doesn’t.

In order to achieve this vision, there are many different investments we’ll need to make. In key apps, we have no social app effort yet and our video effort is weak. We’re going to need to jumpstart both. In platform services, we’ve started building an identity, app store and payments with Oculus, but we’re years behind Valve and Google, and we haven’t even started on the avatar and content marketplace. In hardware and systems, we are leading in headsets, controllers and low level SDK for VR, but we don’t have a real development / graphics system and we’re far behind on AR.

This document is so old Facebook launched and killed several social and video efforts after this.

Over the next few years, we’re going to need to make major new investments in apps, platform services, development / graphics and AR. Some of these will be acquisitions and some can be built in house. If we try to build them all in house from scratch, then we risk that several will take too long or fail and put our overall strategy at serious risk. To derisk this, we should acquire some of these pieces from leading companies.

I can’t tell what any of this would mean to anyone. If you had read this paragraph back in 2015 when it was sent, it should have indicated periods of chaos, confusion and wasted effort were in the future for the company.

Given our own strengths, we will probably be best served building most apps and platform services internally while using acquisitions opportunistically, and then acquiring most of the core VR / AR and 3D tech where we have little experience. This is why I am supportive of acquiring Unity, expecting we will acquire an AR company in the next few years and opportunistically acquiring VR app teams, while also consistently encouraging us to ramp up our internal investment on our platform services ourselves.

They did acquire VR app teams but, without Unity coming into the fold, many of the words around that are functionally meaningless. In fact, the rest of the document is largely about the Unity acquisition strategy and how it would solve so many of Facebook’s structural problems in the space.

Since that acquisition never happened, the rest of the document is largely meaningless strategic confusion.

Last October, Apple released the Dual Knit Band alongside the M5 upgrade, allowing both generations of headset to carefully distribute weight better across the head using a single dial adjusting both soft straps. On a weekly basis right now, people are even attending live Lakers games in Apple Immersive VR. There’s even support for multiple types of spatial inputs, with a pen for art and PlayStation VR2 controllers for games.

The tiny touches being added to Apple Vision Pro are so subtle even regular users might not notice them. My favorite place in VR can be reached about 10 seconds after Vision Pro touches my head sitting on the rock Amalthea around Jupiter. You have to pause and take a breath to notice the clouds slowly moving down on the planet, but you can also set time to move faster so you can see it happening more quickly. Some team at Apple even seemed to sneak in rings around Jupiter in a recent update to this virtual environment. I have a tip for Apple Vision Pro owners who want the ultimate cinematic experience in a headset right now. Set the sun behind Jupiter and stop time there, then enjoy what feels like a black hole as the theater to your movie.

Taking all these pieces together, one could almost think Apple is building up to something.

Meanwhile, Meta laid off large chunks of its gaming division in January and you can take a tour through the reviews of Civilization VII as it was built for the Meta Quest platform requiring “a Meta account” to play one of Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite games online with others. A one star review for the game left 15 days ago (the title only has 330 reviews overall) states: “Abandoned game. 1 year after release and only 2 updates (last update was 6 months ago). This VR version is only 30% of PC version and definitely not worth the money.”

(Also, good luck trying to find details online about Oculus Arcade. It was the same basic idea as Resolution’s upcoming Retrocade for Apple Arcade, but the service was killed in its crib under Facebook a decade ago)

Developers Building To A Vision

I’m in contact with dozens of developers spread across the globe and many of them continue to whittle away at spatial ideas across a great number of headset designs.

Only a small percentage are using Vision Pro to imagine software for a wide range of situations, but those that do see a long-term vision they believe in. There are even some developers who built software for the Meta Quest ecosystem that would be an ideal fit for Vision Pro, but because of the cost of the headset and the small market, they can’t afford to get their software up and running there just yet.

Nonetheless, at the two-year mark, interesting things are happening in Apple headsets on a weekly basis now as more and more things get added to the system.

If you’re working on something interesting in Apple Vision Pro, I’d love a code sent to ianontherecord@gmail.com so I could check it out.