ZD 25.24: Extended Reality Today
Is AI making Extended Reality good enough for mainstream consumption?
Extended Reality has been long dreamt of. AI and advances in hardware are making that dream a reality. Hard French House musical coda to match.
The Distilled Spirit
State of the Country
🧠 America's Internal Brain Drain ()
Screen addiction has made Americans dumber and leads to internal brain drain.
👍 Social Media Brings Us Too Close ()
The social media echo chamber does not let go, it keeps you engaged and enraged. You can’t move away from the fracas anymore.
💾 US Air Traffic Control Runs on Floppy Disks (Ars Technica)
Among other challenges, US Air Traffic Control runs on some very dated technology.
👩🎓 Comp-Sci Majors in Trouble (Futurism)
Learning to code does not lead to guaranteed six figure employment. Supply has caught up with demand.
Economics and Investment
🚢 How Tariffs are Breaking US Trade ()
Tariff revenues are the biggest tax increase in more than 30 years. Imports and exports have dropped considerably. We are in uncharted territory.
📉 Worrisome Economic Data ()
Hard economic data is holding up while sentiment and some behavior paint a different picture.
📈 Is a Bigger Market Rally On? ()
Bullish stock market signals abound — are we on the cusp of a sustained stock market rally?
Drone Warfare
🐝 Drones Disrupt Warfare ()
Small, cheap consumer grade drones are rapidly changing warfare. Companies are working hard to build defensive systems to counter the drone swarms on the horizon.
🗺 Strategic Depth in the 21st Century ()
Strategic depth is a term that once applied to terrain. In an era of small drones and satellites it applies to much more.
🎈 Marine Corps Loitering Munition ()
Detailed discussion of tactical and doctrinal considerations around employing loitering drones for US Marine use.
🐦 Fiber Optic Birds Nests (Forbes)
Russian drones often use fiber optics for guidance. They also make great birds nests.
Tech Advances
✅ Computing is Efficient ()
Americans spend nearly half our time online, but computing only accounts for four percent of a typical American’s power consumption. Computing is an incredibly efficient use of energy.
👕The Shopify Tech Stack ()
Have you ever wondered how Shopify pulls it all together to sell you more things? See this deep dive for an explanation of the components.
🔋 Battery Storage Deep Dive ()
Battery storage is an important part of the dream of renewable power. Building and deploying it is no easy task.
Trending in AI
🐻 AI Sludge is Coming to Your Feed ()
Have you met stormtrooper Greg yet? Or partied in the woods with sasquatch and yeti? Veo2 has unleashed a wave of AI generated slop into your feed. For $25 you can even learn how to make your own.
🤖 7 Agent Problems No One is Talking About ()
We all have a bunch of SAAS products that hold fragmented and specialized views of our data. Agents sound great but there are many real world challenges they must overcome to be truly useful.
👷♀️ AI Job Proofing Traits ()
Harvard Professor Howard Gardner published Five Minds of the Future in 2007. It is still relevant today. Discipline and creativity FTW.
🛒 Will AI Bring Back General Purpose Products? ()
The internet removed physical constraints and enabled many specialized products. AI’s superpower to tailor content to individual customers makes generalized products that are specialized per user very attractive.
Deep Research Tools
🤵 Deep Research is the New Operator’s Edge (
)Have you stopped googling yet? Deep research is amazing but don’t treat it as a copy/paste shortcut.
🤩 Perplexity’s New Features ()
Aside from obscure South American soccer scores, Perplexity is a functional Google replacement for me at this point.
📖 AI Deep Research Explained ()
Deep Research is a lot more than a LLM request with a long timeout and a big web search.
Professional How To
📓 Content Repurposing with NotebookLM ()
Use NotebookLM to create mind maps to repurpose your content across various mediums.
🌞 Atomic AI Habits ()
Atomic Habits pairs very well with AI. Here are some great examples of how that works.
👩🚒 Anti-Firefighting Playbook ()
Solid advice of getting your project management game out of reactive mode and avoid the constant firefighting that dominates most projects.
🏦 To Scale, First Do the Things That Don’t Scale ()
Learn what you want to do and how it works before you scale it up.
Food and Fun
🍕 A History of Pizza ()
Trace the development of Pizza from early flatbreads to the birth of the modern incarnation in New York.
🥫 The Future of Red Bull is in a Pouch ()
Energy pouches are coming to a bodega near you.
🖼 Investment Grade Concert Posters (alts.co)
Concert posters, like other forms of nostalgia, can be investable assets.
⚽ How Soccer Beat the Sneaker Market ()
Soccer boots have become fashion shoes. Jerseys are hot too.
Extended Reality Gets Real
This year's Augmented World Expo felt fundamentally different. Instead of the usual "XR is coming someday" presentations, we heard concrete timelines, partnership announcements, and real market data that suggests we've crossed a threshold. The smart glasses market has hit what industry panelists are calling the hockey stick moment. Devices are going into the mainstream. AI is tying up loose ends. It's an exciting time for the industry.
The XR Convergence
XR has long hovered on the cusp of viability—promising but not quite ready. A lot had to align for the technology to blossom. In 2025, five critical technologies have finally converged to push XR over the hump.
Hardware Reaches Wearability
Display technology now delivers everything from immersive wraparound experiences to transparent overlays that integrate seamlessly with real-world environments. Snap's new Spectacles exemplify this evolution—lightweight, standalone glasses with no external packs or tethers. Meanwhile, companies like XREAL are pushing the boundaries further, making devices smaller while expanding visual capabilities to 57-degree fields of view.
Power Efficiency Breaks Through
The push toward all-day wearability has driven major advances in power management. The challenge of supporting high-resolution imaging within strict power constraints is being solved through distributed processing that intelligently allocates workload across glasses, companion devices, and cloud infrastructure.
Network Infrastructure Evolves
Smart glasses now operate as part of a broader constellation of devices that communicate and work together. This companion device model relies on wireless networks that now support seamless multi-device interactions.
Platforms Mature
Android XR represents Google's first new Android platform built specifically for the AI era. The ecosystem spans multiple partners—Google with Samsung and Qualcomm, Snap with comprehensive developer tools, Meta with new access toolkits. Software support is finally coming into focus.
AI as the Integration Layer
This is where everything clicks. Multimodal AI has become the bridge between technical capability and practical usefulness. Google's integration enables natural language navigation—you can describe where you want to go and instantly teleport there in Maps. Meta's conversational AI works without wake words. Snap is developing spatial intelligence that understands and interacts with physical environments. Language and vision unlock the platform and make spatial computing much smoother to operate.
Shipping Soon
Next-generation Snap Spectacles launch next year featuring see-through displays with automatic tint adjustment. Strategic partnerships with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker signal serious retail ambitions. Project Aura, their developer edition, arrives first to build ecosystem momentum.
Meta brings scale, having shipped two million Ray-Ban units—demonstrating real market traction. A new developer toolkit arrives in Q4, with major announcements expected at Connect in September. Their focus is clear: reach 10 million unit scale so developers can thrive.
Samsung's impressive Project Muhan launches later this year with 4K per eye resolution. XREAL's Project Aura represents the first optical see-through Android XR device, featuring a 70-degree field of view in a remarkably compact form factor. The platform has potential for scale and will likely attract more hardware investment in the years ahead.
Multiple technological threads have finally converged to make AR glasses genuinely viable. Wearable hardware is here, AI makes it useful, and platform ecosystems make it profitable.
Musical Coda
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