What is spatial computing, and why has VR not taken over?
Spatial computing means interfaces that operate in three-dimensional space around you rather than on a flat screen — headsets, passthrough mixed reality, hand and eye tracking. The technology works considerably better than it did; the obstacles are largely not technical.
What actually improved: high-resolution displays close to the eye; inside-out tracking, removing external sensors; low-latency passthrough video making mixed reality practical; hand and eye tracking replacing controllers; and substantially better comfort and optics.
Why adoption has remained narrow:
No settled killer application. Gaming is genuinely good, and the broader productivity case — virtual monitors, spatial workspaces — has not proved compelling enough to displace a laptop for most people.
The social cost. A headset isolates you from the room. Every co-located social norm — glancing at someone, being interruptible, sharing a screen — breaks. This is a design problem, not an engineering one, and it is the deepest obstacle.
Physical comfort. Weight on the face, heat, glasses compatibility, hair, and sessions measured in tens of minutes rather than hours.
Motion discomfort, which affects a meaningful minority and is worse with artificial locomotion.
Cost, particularly for devices that supplement rather than replace a phone or computer.
Content economics. Small installed base means limited content investment, which limits the installed base.
Where it genuinely works today: training and simulation, particularly where real practice is dangerous or expensive; surgical planning and image-guided procedures; design review of physical objects at true scale; remote assistance with an expert seeing what a technician sees; some therapeutic applications with real evidence, notably exposure therapy and pain distraction; and gaming.
The likely direction is away from full immersion — lightweight glasses with a modest display and good audio, doing a few things well and leaving the world visible. That form factor sidesteps the social and comfort problems, and the constraint is optics, battery and thermals rather than concept.
A recurring lesson: the technology has been declared imminent repeatedly since the 1990s, and each wave underestimated how much ordinary human factors matter.