XR

Immersive AI has a convenient myth: put a stronger multimodal model inside a headset, let it see what the user sees, and the future of work politely appears. Very cinematic. Slightly incomplete. The real problem is less glamorous and more operational. Extended-reality work is not just a visual scene. It is a long-running loop of perception, memory, reasoning, instruction, correction, confirmation, and physical effort. The model must understand what is happening over time. The human must still steer the system without becoming a tired thumb attached to a battery pack. ...

Face avatars fail in a very human way: they look fine until someone actually uses their face. A slight smile is easy. A frontal view is easy. A polite corporate-video expression, the kind that says “I am excited to join this quarterly alignment session,” is also easy enough. The real test begins when the mouth opens wide, the eyebrows compress, the head rotates, the teeth appear, the skin folds, and the avatar must still look like a person rather than a damp sticker stretched over a mesh. ...

A laboratory is not a spreadsheet with a sink. That is the small but expensive fact many AI-for-science stories politely step around. Models can rank genes, design proteins, summarise papers, draft protocols, and produce the usual confident parade of mechanistic hypotheses. Then a human still has to seed the cells, choose the pipette, avoid contaminating the plate, notice that an incubation step was skipped, and remember the trick that never made it into the protocol because, apparently, civilisation runs on tacit knowledge and Post-it notes. ...