Monday June 29, 2026
VR Wowed Everyone and Convinced No One
Almost everyone who has tried VR (Virtual Reality) has been wowed, but no one is using it. That gap between the demo and the daily habit is the whole story, and the giants that bet biggest on it are now quietly backing away. Start with $META. The 2021 rebrand from Facebook was a billion dollar declaration that the future was virtual, and four years and more than $70 billion in Reality Labs losses later, Meta has closed its in-house VR studios, pulled the VR version of Horizon Worlds off Quest, and redirected nearly all of its ambition toward AI and its Ray-Ban smart glasses. When the company that renamed itself around the metaverse now treats VR as a side project, that tells you most of what you need to know about where the market stands.
Pico, the VR headset brand owned by ByteDance, felt that shift first. ByteDance was happy to chase Meta down the subsidized low end of the market, and the moment Meta eased off the gas, Pico canceled its next consumer headset and backed out of the fight.
Apple $AAPL was supposed to be the adult in the room, and in many ways it delivered. I think the Vision Pro was revolutionary, but it was a revolution in spatial computing and eye tracking rather than a product anyone needed every day. It never found its killer app, only sold about 600,000 units, and Apple has now shelved its successors and put the headset line on ice to chase smart glasses instead.
The strong use cases never went away. Surgical training, classroom immersion, and industrial simulation all work and all deliver real value, but none of them are venture scale on their own and none of them are the killer app the whole industry was waiting for. That is the trap. Meta went hunting for a billion consumers when the realistic prize was a handful of institutional markets, each useful, each real, and each too small to justify the tens of billions poured into building a mass platform. Those markets also take years to crack, since hospitals, schools, and the military move on slow procurement cycles and the incumbents inside them resist new tools, which is exactly why the consumer shortcut looked so tempting in the first place.
What changes the picture is mixed reality done right, a dual-mode device with all-day battery life and light enough to forget you are wearing. It also needs a price closer to a PlayStation than a used car.
I am not writing VR off yet, after all I did write a book on the Metaverse and I drive a car with the license plate METAVRS, so my optimism is on the record. But the honest read today is that augmented reality has more real uses than VR does, the kind that fit into an ordinary day instead of asking you to disappear into a headset. VR may turn out to be less about everyday computing and more about entertainment, a place you visit rather than a place you live and work.
◾ Chinese AI platforms match performance of Anthropos’s Mythos (WSJ)
◾ $GOOGL caps Meta’s use of Gemini AI (FT)
◾ European Banking Authority proposes 12.5% revenue tax on non-compliant token issuers (Cointelegraph)
Government & NGO Actions
◾ Trump administration grants trusted partners access to Mythos 5 model (WSJ)
◾ Vatican’s AI Commission holds first sessions (Vatican)
◾ BIS warns stablecoins threaten financial stability, bank funding, monetary policy, monetary sovereignty (BIS)
◾ EU Economic Affairs Committee weighs whether DeFi, staking, NFTs should be regulated (European Parliament)
◾ Austria lobbies EU to host Anthropic model, countering US block (Reuters)
◾ Spain rules out extensions past July 1 MiCA deadline (Reuters)
◾ Senators Curtis R-UT and Schiff D-CA press CFTC on Polymarket deceptive marketing (Curtis Senate)
◾ Dems urge CFTC to halt prediction market lawsuits against individual states (Blumenthal Senate)
◾ Monetary Authority of Singapore adds Hyperliquid to Alert List (MAS)
◾ UK ratings body uses AI to reclassify HBO Max’s entire film catalogue (Variety)
◾ Australia extends crypto license application timeline by 3 months (ASIC)
Financial Notices & Public Company Releases
◾ Strategy $MSTR trading at 0.99 mNAV (Strategy)
◾ SpaceX $SPCX joining Nasdaq 100 index (CNBC)
◾ SpaceX $SPCX added to Russell 1000 index (Barron’s)
◾ Securitize and Cantor Equity Partners II $CEPT raise $400M, eye July 1 merger close (PR Newswire)
◾ BTC Digital $BTCT announces private placement of up to $28M (Morningstar)
◾ KULR Technology $KULR extends ATM equity offering pause through Q3 (GlobeNewswire)
◾ SOL Strategies $STKE files amended and restated Q2 financials and MD&A (Newsfile)
Restructuring, Hacks, Losses & Legal Updates
◾ Ethereum Layer 2 protocol Loopring winding down operations (Loopring)
◾ Sony cuts 292 jobs at Bungie (GamesIndustry)
Crypto Protocols, Applications & Business News
◾ X launches money services to select clients (X)
◾ DCG’s Yuma launches asset management arm (CoinDesk)
AI Models, Applications & Developments
◾ US Government to vet who gets access to OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 (Washington Post)
◾ Chinese memory chipmaker CXMT signs $3B supply agreement with Tencent $TCEHY (Reuters)
◾ Baidu required IPO investors to buy chips for Kunlunxin AI chip allocation (The Information)
◾ Coinbase $COIN cutting AI spend by 50% (X)
◾ $HIVE signs LOI for 10-year lease at 32MW Swedish facility (Newsfile)
◾ Apple $AAPL eyes memory chips from blacklisted Chinese suppliers (FT)
◾ Asian neocloud Firmus building Indonesia data center with 170,000 Nvidia server chips (The Information)
◾ OpenAI poaches Apple $AAPL head of Vision Pro and smart glasses (Bloomberg)
The Attention Economy, Gaming & Interactive Shifts
◾ DraftKings $DKNG launching proprietary prediction markets exchange (Business Wire)
◾ Microsoft $MSFT hikes Xbox prices worldwide, drops top-end 2TB model (GamesIndustry)
Space Systems, Satellites & Cosmic Activity
◾ SpaceX $SPCX receives FTC approval to acquire Mesh Optical Technologies (Bloomberg)
◾ Firefly Aerospace $FLY acquires vision navigation firm Space-ng (Firefly)
◾ SpaceX $SPCX in US phone partnership talks with Charter Communications $CHTR (Bloomberg)
◾ Japanese spacecraft set for closest-ever flyby of near-Earth asteroid (Space.com)
◾ Audit finds NASA canceled $5.9B in Artemis hardware contracts (Space.com)