For decades, speculative fiction has dictated public expectations and venture capital investment horizons for spatial technology. When creators design spatial hardware or write interactive software, they do not build in a cultural vacuum; they build in the shadow of science fiction. Media like Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, Reki Kawahara’s Sword Art Online, and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek helped shape popular expectations for immersive media. However, pop culture often conflates these sci-fi visions into a single monolithic idea of "the Metaverse" or "Virtual Reality," ignoring the radically different software, hardware, and biophysical paradigms required to achieve each one. To evaluate...
In the early decades of interactive digital media, storytelling lived inside isolated runtimes. Players bought a disc or downloaded a multi-gigabyte app, waited for installation, and entered a closed ecosystem before a story could begin. As spatial computing and generative AI converge, that friction-heavy distribution model becomes the main bottleneck to mainstream narrative adoption. If a story requires app-store approvals, multi-gigabyte installs, and platform-locked ecosystems, it stays trapped in isolated silos. The central question is no longer whether spatial stories can be rendered at high fidelity, but whether they can be distributed, synchronized, and experienced across devices without forcing every...
When Virtual Reality VR captured public imagination in the mid-2010s, the design paradigm was clear: total sensory replacement. The goal was to blindfold the user from physical reality and transport them into a fully synthesized, pre-rendered 3D vacuum. However, as head-mounted displays evolved from heavy, tethered VR boxes into lightweight, high-density optical and video passthrough systems, a more profound narrative affordance emerged: spatial grounding. Instead of escaping physical space, modern spatial computing layers digital narrative directly over physical architecture. The physical room, table, or city street ceases to be an obstacle; it becomes the canvas, stage, and co-author of the...
Interactive systems have changed how stories can be authored, experienced and revisited. We are moving from linear, passive media consumption, "looking through a window", to spatial, dynamic co-creation, where participants step through the frame into shared digital realities. This is the first post in a 5-part series examining the technological, structural, and theoretical shifts that have redefined interactive media over the past five decades. We trace this trajectory from 1970s text-based multi-user environments to modern passthrough spatial computing Apple Vision Pro, Meta Quest 3, open web rendering stacks WebGPU, WebXR, WebTransport, and generative AI narrative directors. Along the way, we...
AI is being sold as the biggest productivity shift in a generation. That excitement is understandable: the tools are fast, capable, and sometimes astonishing. But excitement is not the same as judgment. The real danger of AI hype is that it turns impressive output into a substitute for expertise. When organizations confuse fluency with truth, they make expensive decisions without understanding the limits of the technology or the risks of overreliance. The risks of AI hype Overreliance The most common mistake is treating AI as a substitute for expertise instead of a tool that augments it. A model can generate...
Rachel Andrew's talk at Pixel Pioneers 2026, "A Pragmatic Guide to Browser Support," provides a useful overview of the state of browser support and the trade-offs developers face when choosing what to build on top of the web platform. The talk emphasizes that browser support is not a single, universal rule: it depends on the browsers your audience uses, the feature in question, and the goals of the project. This post does not aim to prescribe one right way to handle browser support. Instead, it asks a few practical questions: how to define a baseline for a project, how to...
As CSS evolves into a richer calculation language, expressing exact intent becomes increasingly important. Stylesheets can now compute values dynamically using mathematical functions and layout-aware units. This post will explore CSS infinity constants, what they are, why to use them and how to use them with examples to illustrate the different use cases. What is infinity in CSS? The CSS infinity and -infinity constants provide an explicit way to declare extreme bounds. Used inside calc and other math functions, they allow stylesheets to specify that a value should expand or contract to the absolute limits permitted by the browser. css...
AI can support writers by generating ideas, suggesting improvements, and drafting sections of text. It is most effective as a supplement to human creativity and critical thinking, rather than a replacement for them. This post compares two strategies for using AI agents in the writing process: editing and co-writing. Each strategy has its own benefits and limitations, and writers should consider which approach works best for their needs. What is an agent in this context? An agent, in this context, refers to an AI system designed to perform specific tasks. In this post, we're using agents as both editors and...
Kent C. Dodds, a well-known educator and developer in the React community, recently released a video titled "The Framework wars are over. Why no one dethroned React." In this video, Kent explores the reasons behind React's continued dominance in the frontend development landscape. He quotes this tweet from Daxhttps://x.com/thdxr/status/2069933148767400094, a software engineer and educator, which highlights the importance of understanding why React has maintained its position as the leading frontend library. it&39;s worth deeply studying why no framework dethroned reactit&39;s completely misunderstood and it&39;s why every prediction you see by programmers tends to be wrongand once you get it, you...
Structuring a WebGPU application requires matching your render loop architecture to your application's interactivity. Using a continuous animation loop everywhere is a performance anti-pattern that drains battery life and wastes hardware resources. This post started as part of the WebGPU 2026 update but it grew into a separate article because the topic of animation architecture is not specific to the 2026 update. The principles here apply to any WebGPU application, regardless of the year. Different strategies Single-Pass Static Rendering Execute your WebGPU pipeline exactly once, without a loop, when dealing with: Data Visualization: Static charts, graphs, or mathematical plots that...
