Mixed Reality

Tech companies like Apple, Meta, and Microsoft invest heavily in immersive technologies such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. While VR transports users to a fully digital space and AR adds digital elements to the real world, mixed reality allows interaction with both at once.

The earliest computers bear little resemblance to the computing devices that most people rely on today. This timeline graphic from the Computer History Museum tracks their evolution, from the early days of bulky mainframes that only experts generally used through to the personal computing revolution and on to the modern mobile era. Readers will learn important context ahead of the next major computing platform shift.

Consumer electronics devices featuring mixed reality technologies, including augmented and virtual reality, are increasingly finding their way into the mainstream. This comprehensive Ted Talk walks listeners through what these technologies entail, how they work, and why they’re increasingly showing up around us in products like headsets from the biggest tech companies like Apple and Meta.

Meta, back when the company was still known as Facebook, once tried and failed to launch a smartphone. With the arrival of the mixed reality era, the company decided to make another hardware play again—and this time, it’s having better luck. Meta’s aggressively priced Quest headsets offer VR for the masses, and here CEO Mark Zuckerberg shows off the new mixed reality experiences and more available with the latest version, the Quest 3.

Apple’s mixed reality Vision Pro headset, which starts at $3,499, isn’t exactly positioned to be a mainstream device just yet. Nevertheless, the device has begun to proliferate among certain industries and consumer groups. Some doctors, for example, are now taking advantage of the Vision Pro’s AR and VR capabilities and wearing it during surgeries. This article details how it might have a future as a medical, separate from other use cases that emerge.

The smartphone era has driven a large share of the consumer electronics market for almost 20 years now. But what comes next? Dominant computing platforms come and go over time, and there’s reason to believe that mixed reality devices like headsets and glasses might be the form factor that eventually replaces smartphones. This article presents a snapshot of where we are right now in the VR era, and what the future holds.

When it comes to the most popular consumer electronics devices today, Pew research data shows that almost 93 percent of Americans use either an iPhone or Android smartphone daily. Since the arrival of the smartphone era, new devices are constantly jockeying for attention — from smartwatches to rings, headsets, glasses, and much more. This article lays out an overview of what might come next after the smartphone era has passed.

Mixed reality headsets aren’t a mainstream consumer electronics product yet, but that hasn’t stopped a growing number of tech companies from continuing to release new ones. In this podcast interview, Paramount Pictures futurist Ted Schilowitz and Microsoft HoloLens director of Mixed Reality Greg Sullivan walk listeners through terms like VR, AR, and mixed reality, while also explaining how using products like Meta’s Quest can feel a little like having a superpower.

When mixed reality headsets are shown off, it’s often in the context of entertainment or personal use cases at home. Front-line manufacturing workers, meanwhile, are the backbone of many industries, and this video from Microsoft shows how a mixed reality headset can facilitate everything from those workers’ hands-on education to immersive guides overlaid onto a workers field of vision that support training and knowledge transfer across an organization.

Meta’s social apps like Facebook and Instagram are the most high-profile part of its business, but the company has sought building out a hardware line of peripherals like the Quest headset, which combines virtual and augmented reality.