The XR / Spatial Computing Magazine
Apple Vision Pro, AR, VR, and the interfaces and stories being built for spatial and mixed-reality computing.
The 2018 Tham Luang rescue is one of the most documented events of the decade, and almost none of that documentation conveys the space. A scanned VR reconstruction does — which is exactly why the studio kept the scoring system out of it.
Rather than porting a back catalogue into a headset, A.R. Rahman built for it: three Kathak performances fused with Western classical repertoire, remixed in Apple Spatial Audio, plus a Vision Pro re-edit of his Cannes XR film.
A text-to-image model gives you a picture. Marble gives you a place — a 3D world you can walk through, edit, and stitch to another. World Labs just made it available to anyone, and the money behind it is enormous.
Smart glasses could take photos and whisper directions, but you couldn't see anything. Meta's Ray-Ban Display glasses add an actual screen in the lens plus a wristband that reads subtle finger movements — everyday AR that finally has something to show you.
The keynote sold visionOS 27 as an M5 refresh. The actual beta reveals a bigger overhaul of how you address the system itself — which matters more for daily use than another chip generation.
Where visionOS asks you to build for one company's stack, Android XR is explicitly betting on standards you can already target. That's a real strategic difference, not just a spec sheet one.
Streaming instead of porting, Gaussian splats instead of manual modeling, and a spatial web that doesn't require the App Store at all. None of it made the keynote highlight reel.