In spring 2023, weeks before WWDC, I wrote the first article in the Meta Wars series (in Bulgarian) — about the looming battle between the tech giants for dominance over mixed reality. I promised a series. Life (and a few dozen XR projects) got in the way. 😅

Three years later the war is more interesting than I imagined — and it's time to pay my debt. Meta Wars is back as a full series. But before looking ahead, let's do something few forecasters have the nerve to do: check publicly what we got right and what we didn't.

The scorecard: 2023 vs reality

"Apple will unveil its MR headset on June 5 at WWDC" — ✅ Exactly. Vision Pro was announced on June 5, 2023, and went on sale in February 2024. "M2 chip with 16GB of RAM" — ✅ Correct. The first Vision Pro shipped with the M2. In 2025 Apple refreshed it with the M5. "Eye tracking as the core interaction" — ✅ Eye tracking plus the pinch gesture became the benchmark for the category. So good that the competition copied it one to one. "A price between $1,500 and $2,500" — ❌ I was an optimist here. $3,499. I wrote back then that if the specs were really that high, the price would be "closer to $3,000" — even that turned out to be an underestimate. "Two 8K displays" — ❌ The rumours exaggerated: the micro-OLED panels are around 4K per eye. Still the best image in the industry, but not 8K. "Apple's successful entry will validate the industry and push the other giants into the race" — ✅✅ This was the central thesis of the article. And it came true more literally than I expected: Google built an entire operating system (Android XR), Samsung entered with a flagship headset, and Valve returned to hardware. The race is no longer a duel — it's a battle royale.

Score: 4 out of 6. I'll take it. 🎯

What nobody predicted

The real twists of the last three years weren't in the specs — they were in the strategies:

Meta killed the metaverse. The company that renamed itself for the metaverse officially dropped it as a strategic imperative and pivoted hard to smart glasses. Quest 4 is not expected until around 2027.
Apple hit pause. After the M5 refresh, Vision Pro is effectively frozen as hardware — Cupertino's priority is now glasses. The irony: Apple legitimised the headset category… and then left it.
Google came back from the dead. After Google Glass and Daydream, few believed Google would try a third time. Android XR plus Samsung Galaxy XR ($1,799 — exactly the price range I predicted for Apple 😄) is the most serious platform attack on Apple in years.
Smart glasses exploded. Shipments jumped by more than 110% in the first half of 2025 alone. The war moved from your head… to your nose.

The new map of the war

In 2023 I saw a duel: Apple vs Meta. In 2026 there are three fronts:

Headsets — Vision Pro (M5) vs Galaxy XR vs Quest 3/3S, with Valve's Steam Frame on the horizon.
Smart glasses — Meta's Ray-Ban Display vs Samsung's upcoming Galaxy Glasses vs whatever Apple is quietly preparing.
Operating systems — visionOS vs Android XR vs Horizon OS. This is the real war: hardware changes, platforms stay.

Each of these fronts gets its own episode in the series. And the season finale is written by the industry itself — Samsung Unpacked in July and Meta Connect in September.

Why this matters for your business

VR Express is not a spectator in this war — since 2015 we have been building on every one of these platforms. The fiercer the competition between the giants, the better and cheaper the devices on which we build training, activations and branded experiences for our clients. The giants' war is a win for business — if it knows how to use it.

Next in Meta Wars: Galaxy XR vs Vision Pro — the $1,799 vs $3,499 fight. ⚔️

Part of the Meta Wars series — the chronicle of the war for the next computing platform.