Above: Me in a more innocent time (by which I mean 2024)

Tech giants are still insisting XR headsets will go mass market, and now, in the latest version of this article of faith, that they'll somehow be integrated into personal superintelligence. While HMDs have many great niche applications, especially for short term use, I'm now convinced they'll never go mass market as our default computing device.

My deeper doubts started after my good friend and staggeringly smart colleague, designer Amber Case (a former research fellow at MIT Media Lab and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society), raised limitations with XR headsets in a recent essay, bringing up points that never occurred to me before.

Briefly put, she argues that there are neurological and even evolutionary barriers to the effectiveness of an XR headset — because touch and even smell are essential to how we acquire knowledge:

I asked my colleague Dr. David Sisson, a Ph.D. in Neurophysiology, why XR wasn’t taking off as quickly as the media promised. He pointed out that audio and visual information — the kind conveyed in HMDs — is only part of how we make sense of what we’re experiencing.

Then there’s the quality of touch conveyed through force feedback in most XR rigs.

“Without touch, there’s no ‘intimacy’. You’re not really interacting with what’s going on,” David told me. “You can hit a ball — and hear the ‘crack’ in VR — but you’re not feeling anything other than a little jerk in the controller that makes you feel like there’s some inertia happening.”

Headsets and their up-close screens, in other words, deprive our minds of the tactile and situational context which feeds into how we build memories…

The famous moment in French literature when the aroma of a cookie sends the author flying backward into his childhood memories has been validated by recent peer-reviewed studies — and strongly suggests digital memories formed apart from smells will be less vivid or indelible. Indeed, a recent study suggests that our sense of smell “may facilitate transfer of learning to other sensory domains”.

Read the whole thing here. These are barriers that seem difficult if not impossible to overcome for mainstream adoption, but they're rarely discussed alongside the usual culprits that supposedly hold XR headsets back: cost, weight, battery life, etc. Amber's essay strongly suggests, even if the XR industry does get to the fabled point where the headset is the size and weight of sunglasses, most of us will still find the experience unsatisfactory, at least for most use cases.

But surely there's a solution to the neurological challenges she raised? I checked with two XR experts: Avi Bar-Zeev, who's spent most of his career developing various VR/XR projects, including the Apple Vision Pro, and Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford, who's led groundbreaking work in virtual reality for over two decades.

What they told me was surprising:

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