From this Wired headline, you might think 2025 will be year I finally get directions superimposed on the real world through my glasses. But read farther and it sounds more like this is still hard and 2025 will just be a year I can listen to podcasts through my glasses, if I wanted to do that for some reason.

• Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3S – These are full-on virtual reality helmets I think. I can see this being cool on, say, a long-haul flight, but not walking around a city. Magic Leap is still out there, somewhere, doing something.
• Ray-Ban Meta – Seriously, this is just making phone calls and listening to music through your glasses. Fine, but not augmented/mixed reality in my opinion. There are some other similar ones from Oppo, Swave, and Emteq and some others that failed on the launchpad or are still in development.
• Meta Orion, Snap Spectacles, Google Android XR – These are supposed to be the real deal, but are still in the R&D phase. So not too hopeful they will burst onto the commercial scene in 2025.
• Form – “smart swim goggles”. I can see this – swimming can be boring, and nobody has invented a truly foolproof set of swimming headphones/earbuds that I am aware of.
• XReal – “focuses on mimicking a big screen display right on the lenses to let users feel like they’re watching media on a big screen”. Again, could be cool on a plane, train, bus, or self-driving vehicle.
• Emteq – basically sounds like a Fitbit in glasses form. Maybe less dorky than when you see joggers with phones strapped to their arms.

You would assume Apple has some augmented/mixed reality R&D work going on, but they usually seem happy to skip the first couple generations of a new product category (think AI) and let it mature a bit before they join the fray. So the lack of any public hype from Apple is probably a sign that the technology is not going to mature in the next 12 months.

So there you have it – I personally am still looking forward to the (mildly dystopian) world of Rainbow’s End, but it doesn’t sound like 2025 will be the year we get there.