Newsroom
The business of complex products
Reporting and analysis on how industrial companies design, demonstrate, and sell products that are hard to explain, and how spatial computing is changing all three.
Research
Runway's GWM Worlds 2 Turns World Models Into Steerable, Real-Time 3D Environments
Runway's second-generation general world model generates continuous 720p video and synchronized audio in real time, letting users and AI agents steer environments through free-form text rather than scripted clips.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 18, 2026 · 5 min read
Deals
Tripo AI Raises 3 Billion Yuan and Previews P2.0, Betting on 3D-Native Foundation Models
A roughly $446 million raise and a simultaneous model preview push generative 3D toward foundation-model scale, with compute the new bottleneck.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 18, 2026 · 3 min read
Devices
Brilliant Labs' $299 Halo Puts On-Device AI and Agentic Memory in Consumer AR Glasses
Brilliant Labs is opening preorders on Halo, a 40-gram color-display AR headset that pairs an Alif B1 edge processor with a patent-pending memory system called Narrative, at a launch price that undercuts every comparable device on the market.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 18, 2026 · 3 min read
Platforms
WebGPU Ships in Every Major Browser Engine, Giving WebXR a GPU-Native Rendering Path
Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari 26 all now ship WebGPU, closing 15 years of WebGL-era constraints and moving WebXR developers toward a shared GPU-native codebase that runs on Quest Browser, Samsung Internet, and Vision Pro.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 16, 2026 · 6 min read
Enterprise
Siemens and Humanoid Deploy Autonomous Robot in Live Factory, Hitting 90% Pick-and-Place Accuracy
The HMND 01 Alpha moved 60 totes per hour across an 8-hour continuous shift at Siemens' Erlangen electronics plant, producing the clearest factory-floor validation of physical AI to date.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 16, 2026 · 5 min read
Devices
Meta Abandons Headset-First Strategy, Bets on Neural-Wristband AR Glasses for Daily Wear
Meta's launch of Ray-Ban Meta Display and Oakley Vanguard, paired with a gesture-control Neural Band, signals the market leader is conceding immersion to Apple and betting the consumer XR race on wearability and utility.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 14, 2026 · 6 min read
Enterprise
Foxconn Designed Its Entire Houston AI Factory Inside NVIDIA Omniverse Before Breaking Ground
The 242,287-square-foot Texas plant building NVIDIA's GB300 servers proves that digital-twin validation has become a prerequisite for large-scale manufacturing.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 14, 2026 · 4 min read
Devices
Stryker Completes First FDA-Authorized Intraoperative Surgery Using Apple Vision Pro
SportSuite Vision's De Novo clearance and a live hip arthroscopy at Duke Health establish the first regulatory pathway for spatial computing in the operating room.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 9, 2026 · 4 min read
Research
World Labs Launches Atlas, a Spatial World Model That Generates Geometrically Consistent 3D Video from Single Images
Fei-Fei Li's startup ships a multimodal autoregressive diffusion transformer that produces 1440p video with 3D Gaussian splat outputs, moving the field from text-prompted frame sequences toward geometry-native spatial generation.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 9, 2026 · 6 min read
Platforms
Qualcomm's Snapdragon Reality Elite Sets the 2027 XR Ceiling with a 160% AI Leap and On-Device 3B-Parameter Models
A 60% GPU boost, 20% longer battery life, and 12°C cooler thermals address the wearability blockers that have kept spatial computing a niche category, and nearly every major 2027 XR device will be built around this chip.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 9, 2026 · 6 min read
Devices
Snap Ships True AR Glasses to Consumers, Staking a Claim Before Meta and Apple Arrive
At $2,195, the company's first mass-market Specs put a standalone see-through AR display on faces ahead of every major competitor.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 9, 2026 · 5 min read
Markets
China's AI Glasses Makers Are Racing Each Other to Wall Street
Four Chinese smart-glasses brands filed or prepared IPOs in 2026, backed by government subsidies and a global AI glasses market that grew more than 300% in a single year.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 9, 2026 · 7 min read
Devices
Valve's Steam Frame Arrives to Challenge the Standalone VR Market
After years under the codename "Deckard," Valve's first standalone headset is officially real, and its streaming-first design takes a different bet than anything Meta or Sony has shipped.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 9, 2026 · 5 min read
Devices
Meta Bets the Platform on Smart Glasses as Connect 2026 Approaches
With Quest headset launches pushed to 2027, Meta's September event is shaping up as a coming-out party for AI eyewear, and the company's pipeline is wider than most observers expected.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 9, 2026 · 5 min read
Devices
Apple's Spatial Computing Retreat: What the Vision Pro's Fall Tells the Industry
After selling roughly 600,000 units at $3,499 each, Apple has quietly wound down Vision Pro development and redistributed its team. The move reads less like a product pivot and more like an industry verdict on where spatial computing is headed.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 8, 2026 · 5 min read
Platforms
Android XR's Opening Move: Samsung's Galaxy XR and the Platform War for Spatial Computing
Google, Samsung, and Qualcomm launched Android XR in October 2025 with a $1,799 headset. The device is a bet on the premise that a price gap, an open platform, and Gemini AI can crack open a market Apple pioneered.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 5, 2026 · 6 min read
Enterprise
The Factory Floor Won the Spatial Computing Debate
While consumer headsets piled up in closets, industrial companies quietly built the most consequential deployments in spatial computing history. Digital twins, AR-guided assembly, and VR training have moved past proof of concept and into production.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 4, 2026 · 7 min read
Deals
The Money Moves: Where Capital Is Flowing in Spatial Computing
A wave of nine-figure rounds and a landmark acquisition have reshuffled the investor map for spatial computing. The categories drawing the most capital tell you where the industry thinks the next five years are being built.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 3, 2026 · 6 min read
Markets
Spatial Computing Grew Up. The Industry Is Finally Catching On.
The conversation at AWE 2026 wasn't about headsets. It was about workflows, enterprise infrastructure, and AI that can generate a 3D model in under 10 seconds. That's a different industry than the one that launched in 2021.
Mainstay Communications Team · September 2, 2026 · 6 min read