By “All the XR” at CES we mean “all the XR we personally saw,” which was a lot, but even walking 23 miles in four days, it’s impossible to see everything. I didn’t even make it to Eureka Park, where many XR companies were located. The scale of this show and the massive size of the Las Vegas hotels on the famous strip boggles the mind as it batters the feet.

One of the first things I noticed were the giant signs promoting TLC Smart glasses and the Sony Playstation 2 VR (PSVR) at the Las Vegas convention center. A Sony VR billboard makes sense. But TCL? I thought they made low cost TVs. We were not the only ones surprised by this. It is a part of a big story that I discovered by writing this roundup.

The next big thing for XR is not VR, or AR as we generally think of spatial computing today. It is using XR optics technology to create a screen extender for smartphones. This is something we call Assisted Reality, because it’s not augmenting anything. It’s a reflector of your smartphone or other device. Yup. XR is a smartphone accessory. I’ve never thought of it that way but when you walk through the show with me you’ll see that’s where the puck is headed in 2023. Give the people what they want. Take what they’re already doing (playing games, consuming media) and make it better. Say hello to the second screen.

112,000 people attended the show this year, which was a big number considering recent Covid spikes and an economic downturn affecting tech in particular. This is a hardware show, and there were dozens of XR headsets to demo. After four days, it starts to blend together, especially since most devices are running test loops, so you don’t exactly have an experience to remember the demos by.

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Read more here: All The XR At CES 2023