
For years, “XR” has been used as a catch‑all term for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality headsets. That made sense when immersive technology was mainly about putting pixels in front of our eyes. But as artificial intelligence moves into our homes, workplaces, vehicles, and even cities, that definition no longer fits.
XR today is expanding beyond headsets to describe an intelligent system — one that senses people and environments, interprets what’s happening using AI, and delivers spatial, immersive responses in real time. In other words, XR is how AI meets the physical world.
Under this broader view, a technology belongs in the XR family if it:
Reducing XR to just headsets misses the bigger picture — the growth of spatial computing, digital twins, and AI‑powered wearables. Together, these systems form the foundation of a human‑scale computing era, where technology responds to people in context, not just on screens.