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Why Mixed Reality Doesn’t Have a Killer App
Lori-Lee Elliott
August 24, 2025
But First…Cool, if Real
Scroll to the end of this newsletter to see if this is real.
Becoming Dauntless
It’s 2025, and mixed reality glasses are finally what we hoped they would be in 2018. So where’s the “killer app” that’s so good people join the metaverse in droves?
No here. But why?
We have the usual suspects:
Chicken-and-egg content issue: Developers hold back until there's mass adoption, consumers hold back until there's must-have content. Stuck in neutral.
The Hardware Factor: Headsets are clunky, cause motion sickness, and make you look like a space tourist crashing your own pub—hard to sell, even for the hardware gods at Apple.
Developer Reluctance: The hardware puts a high price and a high barrier to entry for developers, so they’re playing it safe (or not at all). Those who do play have likely been burned in the past by big tech deprecating a platform with years of your life on it.
Antony Vitillo wrote in a recent blog post that on the development front, creating for multiuser is a huge pain, and the available developer tools are…lacking to say the least. The offerings for true mixed reality headsets (ie the ones with the most utility) are limited so developers aren’t incentivized to make something that is purely mixed reality. Read his whole post here.
According to Reddit, “Once anybody’s grandmother can pick up a headset or glasses to play Candy Crush, that’s when you’ll get the killer app,” and they aren’t wrong.
Like blockchain, mixed reality will have its iPhone moment when we get a must-have app that:
Makes it impossible to ignore.
Doesn’t feel like a toy.
Runs on affordable gear.
Doesn’t trash your neck or sense of normalcy.
We’ve seen flashes of this in fitness, shopping, live social rooms, productivity apps, but nothing yet that ties it all together. My money is on some lightweight “AI” glasses and an app that makes people create a daily habit, that’s simple, useful, and universal.
News You Need to Know About
Augmented Enterprise Summit is holding a virtual XR Mixer on September 3rd. Learn more and register here.
Dauntless XR won a Phase 1 with the US Army DoD SBIR/STTR Program Office to develop Enhanced Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Training Capability using computer vision and augmented reality. woot.
MIT Study Finds That 95% of Gen AI Pilots Fail. As someone who has set foot inside a modern-day corporation, not surprised.
The posts, memes, job postings, and videos that caught my attention this week:
How to hack AI without any computer skills (the Russian Method) (Instagram)
Cyber Bullying on LinkedIn (Instagram). New life purpose unlocked
What Do Humans Do When AI Takes Over? (Instagram)
Barcode vs QR Codes (Instagram) 🎵The more you know 🌈 🎵
Overheard on Slack
Enter the chat. What our devs are talking about…
Minor difference no. 7: Chicken Bullion and Chicken Boolean
var item = (isChicken) ? addToCart() : return;
Context matters:
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