The enabling tech isn’t putting a powerful chip on your face. It’s
streaming content from your phone to lightweight glasses. You need a good display and a solid connection, not a computer on your nose. Amazon shipped free cellular data built into the Kindle. I wouldn’t be surprised if Meta does something like that for glasses. Ray-Ban Meta sales tripled recently. And that’s without Display
glasses. The resolution is limited. The functionality is early. But people want to wear them. Nobody wants to wear a heavy headset to a coffee shop, unless they’re making a video for TikTok. Glasses are different. We won’t see a mainstream device landed in 2026. What the Meta
Smart glasses, Samsung Galaxy XR, Project Aura, the Asus XREAL R1 will do is set the standards. We’re probably somewhere before the 2007 iPhone moment. The product that proved the concept, not the one that put it in every pocket.
GLASSES GAMES WILL BE THE GATEWAY The first great mobile games weren’t console ports. Think about Angry Birds, Candy Crush, Fruit Ninja; they mastered core mechanics and were aimed at short sessions. That’s how they exploded. The same logic applies to glasses, with worse battery life. You can’t do
What I find more interesting is what happens from here. As more
small studios find things that work, we start setting expectations. For players, for platforms, for hardware. The games tell the device makers what to build. Not the other way around.
AI HELPS PEOPLE MOVE FAST; IT DOESN’T IMPROVE RUBBISH GDC’s State of Gaming reports that an increasing number of their respondents believe AI harms the industry where 52% reported a negative view of AI. Every XR article apparently needs an AI section. Here’s mine. Where AI tools help small teams move faster through the parts
that aren’t core creative work. That’s about it. While others chase buzzwords, we’re focused on making games people want to play. A bad core loop is a bad core loop regardless of how much AI you throw at it. Where AI actually matters for XR isn’t game design. It’s making
smart glasses useful enough that people wear them daily. Translation, contextual info. Hardware adoption stuff.
GLASSES WILL INITIATE THE MAINSTREAM JUMP OFF POINT; JUST NOT YET I think AR glasses will be the third major computing platform. After PCs, after phones. Not replacing either - just taking over the lightweight interactions. Think about how many times a day you pull your phone out for
less than 20 seconds. Notifications, changing a song, checking a message. That’s maybe 70% of phone usage. All of that moves to glasses when the hardware catches up. Your phone stays in your pocket for heavier stuff, the same way your PC stayed on your desk when phones showed up.
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screen-heavy gameplay, can’t replicate headset experiences. What you can do is lightweight game interactions blended with the real world. Gamified overlays, location-based stuff, quick social things. This will not be the dominant form of XR glasses content. But it
will be the gateway, which will get millions of people comfortable with mixed reality, without asking them to strap on a headset. Small teams will figure this out first. That’s just how new platforms work.
ARE WE THERE YET? XR has been “almost there” for a decade. I get it. What’s different now is volume. More developers are shipping
more games on more platforms. Hardware going beyond headsets. Economics that let small teams sustain themselves while they experiment. But mass adoption won’t come from better specs. It’ll come from someone building something so simple that people put on glasses to use it and just... keep wearing them.
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