3 Lessons for How XR Companies Can Turn Innovation Into Adoption
- Chris Burgess
- Sep 18, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 30, 2025
The challenge with immersive content is to balance accessibility, repeatability, and scalability while continuing to push the boundaries.
In light of the Snap announcement yesterday, it felt like the right moment to talk about where immersive technology is heading and why adoption still lags behind innovation. During the launch, Snap’s team demonstrated their new Spectacles by showing how users could simply reach out and pinch to select, move, and resize digital objects. The experience was smooth and intuitive, but it did not feel like a leap forward.
That moment captured a pattern I have seen across the XR industry. Most immersive content sits in one of two camps. One camp focuses on spectacular experiences that stretch what is technically possible but are difficult for everyday users to access. The other camp focuses on usability, creating simple interactions that work reliably but rarely feel groundbreaking.
The real opportunity lies between those two extremes. Adoption will come from experiences that are both intuitive and ambitious, where technical sophistication disappears behind effortless interaction.
After more than a decade building in AR and VR, I have seen how hard it is to get that balance right. Teams often chase novelty when they should be designing for understanding. Based on that experience, I share three strategic lessons that can help XR companies turn innovation into adoption.
Lesson 1 - Usability: Make Experiences Accessible
Usability is the first step toward adoption. It determines whether people feel confident enough to engage in the first place. Even the most advanced technology fails if the first interaction feels confusing or effortful.
In practice, usability means walking through the experience from a first-time user’s perspective and removing every point of friction. It is about understanding not just how people use the experience, but how they first encounter it and what keeps them exploring.
Onboarding plays a huge role here. Immersive technology introduces new gestures and modes of interaction that most users have never encountered. Treat onboarding as a design discipline, not a technical add-on. If it feels like a tutorial, it is already too late.
In practice:
Map the first-time user journey and test usability early and often.
Design onboarding experiences that teach through interaction, not instruction.
Use feedback loops and familiar cues to make new gestures feel natural.
Making content usable is what makes it accessible.
Lesson 2 - Innovation: Build Experiences That Inspire
Once the basics work seamlessly, attention shifts to emotional engagement. Usability might earn a user’s trust, but spectacle is what keeps them coming back.
Spectacle does not mean chasing gimmicks. It means delivering a sense of wonder that feels relevant and believable. The best immersive content takes advantage of the hardware’s full capabilities without overwhelming the user.
Staying close to what is technically possible helps teams imagine new ways to surprise and delight people. Whether it is spatial audio, generative content, or realistic physics, the goal is not to show off technology but to make users feel something they have never felt before.
In practice:
Keep track of what new hardware and APIs make possible, but apply them with restraint.
Keep note of those ideas you had that weren't feasible given the maturity of the tech, and revisit them constantly.
Design experiences that give users a reason to return, not just to react.
Balancing ambition with clarity creates experiences that are both spectacular and usable.
Lesson 3 - Reproducible: Create Demos That Scale
A great immersive experience might capture attention once, but a reproducible one creates momentum. For XR companies, adoption depends on how easily an experience can be recreated by partners, developers, and clients.
Too many teams build impressive proofs of concept that cannot be repeated without the same team, tools, or resources. Reproducibility is what transforms innovation into an ecosystem.
When I worked on hand tracking in VR, our internal demos were impressive and received great feedback. Yet our customers could not replicate them because we relied on tools and expertise that were not publicly available. The lesson was simple: innovation matters less than how easily others can reproduce it.
In practice:
Produce your demos using publicly available tools.
Fill your demos with best practices and make them easy to reproduce.
Document clearly, simplify toolkits, and reduce dependencies.
Showcase what can be achieved without internal shortcuts.
Making content reproducible is what makes it ready to scale.
Examples from the Field
AR experiences today are not fundamentally different from what we built in 2011. The hardware has improved, offering more compute power, sensors, and realism, but the core challenge remains the same. When projects push the limits of what is possible, usability or reproducibility is often the trade-off.
Across more than a decade of building in XR, I have seen that pattern repeat. In 2012, accessibility and visual spectacle drove engagement. By 2021, even as interactivity and realism advanced, the barriers to reproducibility remained.
People still respond to simple, well-designed experiences over complexity for its own sake. That truth has not changed.
What has changed is that the technology has finally caught up with the vision. It is now easier than ever to build immersive content that is accessible, repeatable, and scalable. The lessons from earlier projects still hold, and the examples that follow show how those principles played out in practice.
Spectacular Movie Content | |
When working with Universal Studios on their 100-year anniversary campaign, we brought fifteen classic DVD covers to life through AR. The experiences were simple and nostalgic, not complex or gamified. However, the content was visually spectacular given the technology at the time. This combination drove engagement and sales. |  |
Interactive Hand Tracking Demos | |
Our hand tracking demos always impressed audiences but were hard to reproduce because they were hacked together. This left customers underwhelmed by what they could achieve themselves, and we struggled to convert pilots to deployments. The lesson was that great technology only matters if others can replicate it successfully. |  |
How XR Companies Can Turn Innovation Into Adoption
XR adoption will not be driven by hardware breakthroughs alone. It will grow through empathy for users, for developers, and for the partners who bring these experiences to life.
Across all three lessons, the pattern is consistent. Adoption starts with usability, grows through emotional impact, and endures through reproducibility. When companies build with these principles, they stop chasing novelty and start shaping markets.
The opportunity ahead is enormous. The next wave of immersive content will be remembered not for its complexity but for how effortless, inspiring, and scalable it feels. Those are the experiences that reach real audiences and create lasting value.
If you are leading a company building immersive content and want to move from innovation to adoption, let’s talk. I help founders and product leaders design XR experiences that are intuitive, replicable, and ready to scale. Reach out at info@crwburgess.com.
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