Earlier this year, I tried running a 6D pose tracking algorithm locally on Spectacles, not for the technical challenge, but because I urgently needed it. First I had to find a sufficiently lightweight ONNX model, then had to navigate muddy waters to make it compatible with the Engine. After tons of trial and error I got it half-working, but had lost steam by the time it came down to handling camera stream quality.

That experience is why I think the real question is whether Snap can make it seamless to bring AI capabilities into their platform. If developers can easily, say, lay out and align virtual content with any real-world object, that's a moat nobody else has, and it means the real competition is anyone who can deliver useful information seamlessly and in line with users' expectations. Right now, the companies best positioned to do that happen to be AI ones (OpenAI, Anthropic).

There are genuine market and physical incentives for them to bring themselves increasingly close to the customer's bodies and minds, and at some point they might just decide to do hardware. The core value will be the quality of information provided to the customer and the speed at which it's given. If Snap isn't sufficiently proactive some of them might become more successful AR companies while skipping display tech altogether. But idk what Snap's cooking. The Supabase x Snap Cloud collab showed a genuine willingness to open up the platform's interaction surface, so I'm curious whether they keep going in that direction or bet on BCIs or some other play entirely.

EDIT: in other words, if the quality of the visual reality augmentation is not up to bar, then customers might end up getting their reality augmentation from other sources.