AI executives are often claiming that their product will replace [role] in [amount of time]. More often than not, these predictions are false, or at least overly optimistic. But what if people from a decade or so ago were actually able to predict the future?
That’s the question that guided me as I explored the thoughts of Microsoft researchers, an Oculus forum member, and a Métis Canadian entrepreneur named Matthew Unger. These three articles attempted to describe 2026 in terms of how we’ll interact with technology.
I find it fascinating to explore how individuals from previous decades, centuries, or even millennia felt about the future, and how it would differ from their present time. Yet more interesting is seeing how their predictions actually play out; the places in which they were wrong, the places in which they were right, and the places in which they should have been right—but that just wasn’t the way that things played out.
That being said, so much hype is generated by the tech industry, which, whether genuine or not, can cause people’s opinions to be skewed one direction or another in ways that don’t always line up with reality when we look at the big picture. In a few years (it’s gotten to me, now I’m predicting too!), once AI is less of a buzzword and fades into the mundanity of technology—like Wi-Fi—we’re not going to go around making predictions about it. The first prediction I will look at was made in 2014 (when I was around 1) by an Oculus forum member. This community was obviously thinking about VR, and likely picking up on a lot of the hype around VR from around that time. Virtual reality still finds its way into tech news, but AI has overshadowed a lot of VR developments.
As each prediction has a large amount to unpack, I’ll be splitting this into a three-part series, beginning today with part 1.
Chaoss’s Predictions for the Future of VR and More
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Early 2026
Computing in this age will be almost invisible to most, however many more will use it and it will be so everyday and apart of peoples lives that people don't even realize it. Everything is connected and transferring data or information from one device or place to another is as simple as 'swiping' or 'throwing' the thing you wish to send to it's destination device. A lot of things are activated by voice and touch, such as your fridge telling you what would be best to fill it with. It would then order the food for you.
The internet connects everything now such as people, cars, household items and even pacemakers. People even in the most remote of areas able to receive a fast connection. Connection speeds are no longer advertised or measured in Mbps, but rather signal strength and indeed the idea of an internet service provider in the home or small business is slowly fading into obscurity. computing is mostly in the cloud now but high quality virtual environments still require powerful chips to be seen in their full visual glory.
Virtual and augmented reality play an enormous role and is the most visible side of computing progress in this age. Virtual reality is almost real life like, users can control their avatars and interfaces with their minds (by using electrodes or small devices that read signals from the brain and convert those into instructions.) I didn't get the full picture on how this works but it was pretty amazing. Resolution is, believe it or not still an issue in this age. Not so much screen resolution as we know it today but as fidelity and realism in virtual worlds. Unfortunately it is still fairly easy to tell that you are in a virtual environment, however this virtual environment covers your entire field of view and has no sort of perceivable lag or bugs. If a person from 2015 could see VR in 2026 they would be absolutely blown away by the realism and interactivity of these worlds.
Augmented reality (seeing virtual test and objects imposed ontop of the real world) is also very popular, and ties in with virtual reality in many ways. Many people in this age having augmented reality glasses by default much like the last generations with their smartphones.
The virtual worlds have (and details on this are a little hazy so bear with me) become sort of one place, where users can connect or 'jack in' as it's called now into others worlds. People can create their own virtual worlds a bit like how in 2015 people could create their own websites. There are many public virtual worlds, some with objectives and goals, some are experiences. One such experience that I could see clearly was a number of users stuck on a large ship being stalked by aliens, another was a lot more simple and seemed to be geared towards younger children where they were in a sort of infinite green meadow sat in a circle being tought math by a virtual teacher. Search engines are now 'hubs' that allow you to find virtual worlds or libraries of information.
It seemed archiving and preservation is much more important in this age and the public virtual world/web was continuously backed up and protected for future generations to see. It seemed a very fast growing number of people worked in these virtual worlds creating things for others such as clothes, styles, themes and objects although anyone could create virtual objects easily some were very skilled it at and made a lot of money quickly. Virtual teaching is another big hit just starting to become big and widely known about.
Keyboards and mice are now almost obsolete, although a shrinking number of die-hards still choose to use them due to old habits dying hard or mis-trust of brain readers.
Chaoss
As it is now May, it feels appropriate to unpack some of the claims for “early 2026.” Below, I’ll be commenting on each element of the post.
I wouldn’t quite say that computing is invisible yet. Smartphones are, arguably, the dominant form of computing, and are certainly not invisible, nor are laptops. Smart glasses, which are not as easy to see, are nowhere near a mainstream product yet, but I expect more people to have smart glasses in a few years with where the industry’s heading right now. Smartwatches, which have entered the mainstream, are more invisible than a lot of other devices, but I don’t think anyone would call them invisible.
Funny enough, transferring data between devices is still very frustrating and tedious. AirDrop existed at the time Chaoss wrote the post, so I don’t think that’s the intention. On the topic of fridges, some smart fridges have the capability to track inventory—but they’re not ordering food for people.
Internet is certainly embedded into everything now. As the post predicted, people, cars, household items, as well as pacemakers have internet connections. For better or worse, everything sends information back to a server nowadays, and there’s often no way around it (printers are a particularly frustrating example). Starlink is enabling people in remote areas to have a fast internet speed. However, internet speeds are still measured in Mbps, or Gbps, and internet service providers are prevalent.
Certainly not all computing has moved to the cloud. That being said, cloud gaming has been popularized over the last few years, with Nvidia’s GeForce Now leading the charge, as well as Xbox (sorry—XBOX?), Playstation, and Amazon all offering cloud gaming. Another killed-off Google product, much like Google Reader, Stadia offered cloud gaming as well as a controller, and was sunsetted in 2023. As Chaoss predicted accurately, everything does run better locally (assuming you have a decent computer).1
The forum post’s next paragraph is not quite how things played out. VR and AR do not play that big of a role in today’s ecosystem, and I would argue that AI is the more visible side of computing progress, rather than virtual or augmented reality. VR can be very life-like, but it is not mainstream yet—though mind control is becoming a reality with Neuralink and others paving the way. Resolution is still an issue, and virtual worlds do cover your entire frame of view. I can’t speak to lags or bugs, as I have never tried the Apple Vision Pro or similar headsets (the closest I’ve ever used to those is an old Oculus Quest headset, and I was not blown away by the performance).
Augmented reality is not very popular yet, and certainly doesn’t earn the post’s analogy that AR glasses for the current generation are like smartphones for the previous generation. I don’t think that creating virtual worlds now is quite at the ease and scale that creating a website was in 2015, nor are virtual worlds very widespread. Search engines have become a sort of “hub”—not quite in the way the author imagined, but with AI transforming the way that search engines work, instead of results, giving summaries of information.
Archiving/preserving the web is given a moderate importance, mostly with the Internet Archive. Interestingly enough, working in virtual worlds, in a sense, has been realized. As a result of the pandemic, remote work became popular, and while creating objects in virtual reality does not yet prove a successful occupation, teaching online can be.
Keyboards and mice are still very much in use, and while in recent months we have seen a rise in the use of dictation tools such as Wispr Flow and Monologue, brain readers have not seen use among individuals without neurological disabilities such as ALS.
1 That paragraph required quite a bit of research, as I am by no means a gamer, and don’t keep up with gaming news.