Meta just rolled out XR SDK v83, and hand-tracking has taken another step forward. There’s always been debate over controllers vs. hand-tracking, but they’re not actually in conflict. Controllers won’t disappear. For core gaming, they’re still the best solution. Precision, haptics, and overall feel are irreplaceable, and controllers will only keep getting better. But for the mass market, you can’t expect everyone to memorize a bunch of button mappings, and hands are an even more native interface than multi-touch. In the future, there will be a mainstream device where hand-tracking is the default interaction. And honestly, the potential of hand-tracking is barely tapped, we might only be 1% of the way there.

The XR industry has two major misconceptions. 1.People think it will explode soon. 2.People think they can still jump in after it explodes. Whether it’s glasses or headsets, neither will become fully mature anytime soon. But the counterintuitive part is this. Some of the biggest commercial opportunities have their critical window before maturity, not after. So stop forcing every industry into the same pace and playbook as mobile internet. If you let the timeline be what it is, the opportunities will show up over time.

VRChat is probably the only Metaverse product in VR today that truly has dominance. I have not seen any VR app or game that can surpass it in average time spent per user. It has plenty of issues, users complain, and the team is not known for being extremely intense, but all of this highlights how far ahead the model is and how rare its position is within the ecosystem. Over the past decade, every product that tried to challenge VRChat has fallen short. None of them managed to shake its position in the Metaverse space. Gorilla Tag is impressive and social, but at the end of the day it is still a game rather than a Metaverse-level platform. Horizon Worlds invested huge manpower and budget and has real technical highlights, yet from a product perspective there is still a long list of problems to solve. Things will change in the future. On the hardware side, more efficient chips and higher PPD micro-OLED displays will push immersion much further. On the technology side, models like Marble and SAM 3D are forming new generative paradigms, and more spatial intelligence capabilities are being unlocked. These foundational upgrades will become key variables for building the next generation of Metaverse ecosystems. As VR headsets and core algorithms continue to iterate, and as more mainstream users enter VR, it becomes increasingly likely that a next generation Metaverse platform will emerge, one that surpasses VRChat in scale and dominance. But that does not mean the opportunity will be easy to get right. Early hardware volumes are small and easy to overlook. AI looks powerful but initially functions only as a supplement rather than the core. And once everything becomes clear, the giants will flood in with overwhelming force.