What are the Big Extended-Reality Companies Promising?

The following is adapted from Deep Tech.

Virtual reality has gone mainstream, with many of the big tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, investing heavily in the technology. 

To be more precise, these companies aren’t limiting themselves to virtual reality, which you likely recognize as a headset displaying and immersing you within a virtual world. They are exploring the other designations under the extended reality (XR) umbrella as well, which includes virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). 

While Google, Facebook, and Microsoft aren’t the only players in the XR game, they’re certainly the biggest. Interestingly, the kinds of devices they support shows quite a bit about the culture and purpose of each company—each company is developing a unique product that’s setting standards for the rest. 

Google’s Augmented Reality

First, let’s take a look at what Google is promising with their flagship augmented reality device, Google Glass. Google wants to be your guide in the real world, and Google Glass is a pure distillation of the company’s goal to “organize the world’s information.” 

While Glass was famously a consumer failure, it still exists for enterprise use, and the high price tag will come down over time, making it more accessible. How does Google Glass work?

Augmented reality is distinct from virtual reality and, in many ways, is its polar opposite. Where the purpose of virtual reality is to generate a distinct and immersive world, augmented reality intends to add more information to the real world while you’re engaged with it. 

Glass is a voice activated, AR heads-up display (HUD) that projects images and video above the wearer’s field of view. The goal isn’t to overlay what the wearer sees but instead to provide information about what the wearer sees. Underlying all of this power is Google’s vast data and AI platform. What Glass does, effectively, is bring Google into the real world. 

Google doesn’t want to fight for your attention—they want to act as a deeply personal assistant, allowing users to more fully engage in the world.

Facebook’s Virtual Reality

Facebook is the polar opposite of Google in the XR space. While Google doesn’t want your attention, Facebook wants all of it. They want to build a world for you, an oasis you can escape to and live in, comprised of games, work, and of course, your social fabric. 

Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus VR was a clear evolution in this quest. Over the previous decade, Facebook has invested more heavily into scaling out virtual reality than any other company, and their gamble is starting to pay off. 

Oculus Quest was the first VR headset that was entirely standalone, meaning it didn’t need to be plugged into an overpowered gaming computer for use, and had an increasing catalog of tools and games for work and play. Many of the technical details have been solved, and the Quest is the benchmark against which all mass-market consumer devices must distinguish themselves.

Microsoft’s Mixed Reality

Finally, we have Microsoft promising a middle ground, where you integrate the real world with virtual experiences. 

Like Facebook and Google, Microsoft’s play aligns deeply with its corporate culture. Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 in 2020 was a huge leap beyond any competing mixed reality devices and targeted Microsoft’s sweet spot: the corporate market. 

Considering the vast opportunities for overlying digital directions onto the real world (from constructing an automobile to replacing a printer head), MR is the big fat middle that they bet will pay dividends down the road. A Forester report estimates over fourteen million US workers will wear smart glasses by 2025, and Microsoft wants to be the platform of this important market. 

Extended Reality’s Bright Future

Whether we’re talking about overlaying information on our surroundings, integrating real-world and virtual experiences, or creating new virtual worlds entirely, extended reality is the most direct interface to our greater technology ecosystem than any other previously devised. 

Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are leading the way in augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality, respectively. These technologies are still in their early stages, but the future path of extended reality has been clearly laid out—and it’s looking more exciting than ever. 

By the end of the decade, the action of staring at our smartphones will become passé because we’ll be living and working, at least in part, in a virtual environment. 

For more advice on emerging technologies, you can find Deep Tech on Amazon.

Eric Redmond is the Forrest Gump of technology: a twenty-year veteran technologist who always happens to show up wherever deep tech history is being made, from the first iPhone apps to big data to Bitcoin. He has advised state and national governments, Fortune 100 companies, and groups as varied as the World Economic Forum and MIT Media Lab. He has also authored half a dozen technology books (including two tech books for babies) and spoken on every continent except Antarctica. Today, he’s a husband, a dad, and the leader of a global tech innovation team.