Picture your childhood room: the quilted bedspread, the Velveteen Rabbit on the shelf, the familiar creak of the floorboards. You can feel the carpet underfoot, smell dinner from the kitchen, hear your family’s laughter down the hall. Now imagine this isn’t a memory—it’s a perfect digital recreation projected into your mind.
The question is: is that reality and does it even matter? If an experience feels real, if it evokes genuine emotions, does its lack of physicality diminish its meaning?
This question is at the heart of spatial computing. Technology is blurring the lines between physical and digital, creating a reality that is as subjective as it is transformative. The shift may not yet feel seismic, but its implications are profound.
Reality, reconstructed
Virtual and augmented reality have long been relegated to gaming. The platforms remain imperfect, the content still evolving—but the trajectory is unmistakable. We are getting much better at recreating almost every aspect of a physical environment in a digital format.
Gaming has historically paved the way for transformational technologies. Without it, companies like AMD and NVIDIA wouldn’t exist, and machine learning as we know it wouldn’t have emerged. But spatial computing extends far beyond entertainment. It’s already revolutionizing industrial manufacturing, healthcare, and education. Augmented reality enables surgeons to operate with unprecedented precision. Technicians can visualize complex machinery before they touch a wrench.
This shift isn’t happening in isolation. Wearable devices are becoming smaller and more seamless—soon, they’ll be as discreet as contact lenses. Battery life is getting longer. Remote wireless charging is on the horizon. In a decade, our children will laugh at the idea that we ever lived in a world without these capabilities.
I despise the term “metaverse.” It is a clunky buzzword that suggests a virtual escape rather than a revolution in how we interact with the real world. But the core idea, a seamless fusion of physical and digital environments, is where the true potential lies.
We’re not getting a Star Trek holodeck just yet. But science fiction has always been a guide to the future. Self-opening doors were just a fantasy when the original Star Trek aired, now they’re an afterthought.
Now imagine a city where buildings interact with occupants through digital overlays. A park where sculptures evolve with the seasons. Advertising is already heading in this direction. Sophisticated digital billboard companies have been using location-based targeting for years, serving ads tailored to passersby. Now imagine that technology woven into the fabric of everyday life—where every street, every storefront, and even the night sky can be curated and personalized.
Sound dystopian? Maybe. But it’s also inevitable.
When I first tried on the Apple Vision Pro, I was impressed. The digital overlays blended naturally with the physical world. Interacting with floating windows felt intuitive.
Then the battery began to die.
As the screen flickered, I noticed something eerie—everything I had been “seeing” through the device, including the physical world, wasn’t actually real. The Vision Pro was reconstructing reality through its front-facing cameras and projecting it onto my retina. Not just augmenting reality. Replacing it. My environment wasn’t “augmented.” It was fabricated.
And yet, it felt indistinguishable from the real thing.
If I can’t tell the difference, if my perception of reality is already subjective, why cling to the idea of an objective, single reality? Spatial computing isn’t just layering on digital information—it’s redefining what it means to see, perceive, and experience the world.
Who decides what’s real?
As spatial computing advances, reality will no longer be universal. It will be personalized—curated just for you. But this raises a disturbing question: who decides what’s real?
If an algorithm controls your perception, does that make reality just another subscription service?
Real estate, too, will evolve. Physical spaces will be dynamic, programmable, ephemeral. The same building will be experienced differently by every occupant. Architecture will be more about perception than materiality.
Walk through a city, and you may see something radically different from the person beside you. Advertisements will morph. Streets will shift. Digital “art” installations will exist in layers, visible only to those who opt in.
Perhaps you gain more control over that experience in the future? Perhaps you gain control over your entire physical experience? Your world will be uniquely yours.
But if everyone’s reality is different, does a single “true” reality even matter anymore?
The Death of Objective Reality
We like to think of memory as a reliable tether to the past. It isn’t.
Psychologists have long studied false memories—recollections that feel vivid but never actually happened. This phenomenon, popularized as the Mandela Effect, is proof that reality is already slippery.
Darth Vader never said, “Luke, I am your father.”
The Monopoly Man never had a monocle.
Curious George never had a tail.
Our collective memory is corruptible, malleable, and often outright wrong.
If we already struggle to separate fact from fiction, what happens when technology actively reshapes what we see?
This isn’t a new dilemma.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave suggests that what we perceive as reality is merely a projection, distorted by our limited perspective. Nietzsche took it further: “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Immanuel Kant argued that we never experience reality directly. Instead, we interpret a filtered version of it, shaped by our senses, biases, and cognitive structures.
Spatial computing doesn’t just illustrate these theories, it makes them real.
Phygital spaces replace the universal “real” with subjective, fluid, and customizable experiences. Reality ceases to be a fixed truth and becomes a negotiation, a dynamic interplay between perception and programming. The world you see will no longer be the one I see.
This means, essentially, that real estate, and, in fact, our entire built world, becomes fluid and dynamic. We will no longer design structures to meet the lowest common denominator but rather to accommodate the flexibility to enable personalized experiences. The building could look different from the outside based on my personal tastes. At first, this will focus on colors, shapes, and patterns. However, over time, the entire structure becomes dynamic.
One could walk into an office building and have a completely unique and optimized experience. Art on the wall becomes subjective, as will colors, tones, and sounds. My perception of my work environment would be the one most conducive for my performance and well being. My peers could have a completely different experience that is conducive for theirs.
Without the overlay, the structure will surely look bland. All white (or “green?”) walls, no art on the walls, generic furniture. Since the functionality and the perception thereof are no longer connected, the need to shape a generic form no longer exists. The creativity moves from the space to the digital overlay.
If it feels real, is it?
We already spend billions on things that aren’t “real.” Virtual goods, NFTs, digital experiences—these investments matter because they hold emotional weight. Spatial computing takes this further, creating worlds where what we experience is more important than what “exists.”
Reality, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued, isn’t something we observe—it’s something we live.
Spatial computing brings that philosophy to life.
“Goods” and “services” that we consume will evolve to transcend the physical spaces they occupy. Instead of the landlord or office manager selecting a piece of art for the collective, each individual can select their individual passions. This is true in all realms of consumption that are not innately physical, such as food or water. It shifts the consumer power from the collective to the individual. Besides the positive effect it would have on well being and productivity, it will also create a very large financial market. Once you disunite the collective spend and distribute it to the masses, the combined individual spend components would be greater than the previous spend. The virtual goods market will not only continue to grow massively over the next few years as these lines between digital and physical blur, but eventually will eclipse the physical spend by orders of magnitude. With no limitations on space, culture, perception, or morals, our consumption will surely increase collectively.
This spend is no less real, as the reality in which it lives is no less real to me either.
The future of real estate isn’t buildings, it’s experiences
In many ways, we are coming full circle. Primitive physical structures used to be highly simplistic and served multiple uses for multiple constituents. Perhaps you slept in the room during the night and used it as a workshop during the day. Different personas also consumed the space differently. The notion of dedicated structures to serve the community came much later in our evolutionary story.
We evolved structures over time to be highly customized for specific use cases, such as an office, or multi-family rental building. Sure, we have mixed use buildings, but they are the exception, and there’s usually a primary use without which the building couldn’t exist. Spatial computing forces us to rethink this paradigm.
A structure is a box. What goes in that box today is highly specific and prescriptive. One could change use or adapt over time, assuming the regulatory and economic environment support such adaptation. But such changes are highly limited and costly. Digital overlays free us from this burden of specificity.
What I or others will see in the box will differ. Instead of forcing a permanent use, one could easily envision all structures, broadly speaking, transformed to mixed use facilities, such that the use is specific to the cohort occupying it at any given time. Office or retail is no longer a line. If I can sit on a couch on one side of the room with an experience that looks, sounds, and feels like my dream office, I couldn’t care less that on the other side of the room there’s a grocery store that I don’t see or even know about. I may see a wall. This flexibility is empowering.
This forces us to rethink building design to meet all use cases, not just the one that fits today. Think of the efficiency created. Building would perhaps be slightly more complex to build since they would need broader infrastructure, but at the same time, you get to save the previous spend on aesthetics since that would be individualized in a digital layer anyway.
Our world is no longer simply the physical space it occupies, but rather the digital overlay I perceive. The space no longer matters—only my personal experience.
In the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Words create worlds.”
That, in a sentence, is the future of real estate. Not walls. Not materials. Experiences. Phygital spaces don’t just blur the boundary between physical and digital, they obliterate it. The new frontier isn’t tangible or virtual, it’s the infinite potential in between.
So let’s return to where we started: your childhood room with the Velveteen Rabbit.
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. Once you are Real, you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”
Maybe that’s the ultimate lesson of spatial computing. That what matters isn’t what’s real, but what feels real.
And if that’s true, then reality was never as fixed as we thought.
It was always ours to create.
