New technology adoption is slow, because the old one is sticky. And it's fueling the rise of experience marketing.

A week of watching London vanish into its phones, and a guess at what finally lifts our heads back up.

The peak we're all standing on

I spent the last few days in London with my wife, hopping in and out of the Underground. And as a tech nerd it might sound strange, but I think we've hit the ceiling of what our current "travel," "commute," or "pocket" technology can do.

Look around a carriage. Ninety-nine point nine percent of people are on their phones, earbuds in, each sealed inside a private bubble. Nobody talks. Nobody looks. And on the rare occasion two people accidentally make eye contact, both instantly find something fascinating to study on the floor. I've noticed it before. What made me sit with it this time is that I know what's coming next, and I think some of it might actually ease the very thing today's tech created.

Why "AI wearable" is mostly a sticker

Wearables. Call them AI wearables, AR glasses, necklace-type things, the label barely matters. And yet it does. "AI wearable" mostly means it sounds hip enough to charge more for. It also comes with real limits: everything still runs through your phone, or through your voice.

Have you ever tried to hear yourself think on the Underground? Now picture the entire carriage talking to their AI at once. "Hey, reply to Dave." "No, not Dave. DAVE." "Read that back." Forty strangers narrating their group-chat drama out loud, and every one of us would be begging for the silent bubble by the second stop. Voice-first is a dead end in public, which is most of life. Whatever wins won't ask us to talk to it.

A screen you look through, not at

The real shift arrives with wearables that have a screen. Not full AR yet, just a display. Something like the Meta Ray-Ban Display. The interesting part isn't the spec, it's that you can take in content and stay in the room while you do it. Your head stays up. You're still part of the world around you, instead of walking into a lamppost because a reel was too good to pause.

Contextual visualization, or the end of the IKEA manual

From there you add the AR layer, and the whole point of AR is contextual visualization. It understands the situation: it knows you, it reads the world in front of you, and it drops the right information in the right place.

Not a flat IKEA manual that your brain has to fold into 3D and gets wrong ninety-nine percent of the time, so you build the bed twice, the second time with the mystery leftover screws you're certain aren't structural. (IKEA leans right into this, of course. Teambuilding. Fun. Relationship-strengthening. If you can't survive assembling a wardrobe as a couple, the marriage was never load-bearing to begin with.) Imagine the same thing for anything complex you've ever had to figure out from a diagram: the instructions laid over the object, in place, understood on the first pass.

The rollout has a schedule

We're at the edge of what our current hardware and habits can deliver, and the funny thing is you can already see the next step on a calendar. Meta and Ray-Ban's parent company sold seven million smart glasses in 2025 alone, more than tripling the year before, per EssilorLuxottica's own earnings. That's not a rounding error, that's a stadium's worth of people every few days deciding this is worth wearing on their face. Samsung and Google join later this year with glasses wired into Android. Apple has RSVP'd, so it'll arrive fashionably late with a more expensive version of the thing everyone else already brought, and somehow we'll all agree it was worth the wait.

Wearables are the first step. AR is the next one up. And then, oddly, we circle back to VR, because some things we'll still want to disappear into completely, headset on, world off. This isn't one launch to watch, it's a staircase, and it already has names and dates on it.

Slow but sticky

Here's the thing I keep turning over. Look at what technology already did to us. We'll happily text for hours, or video-call someone on the other side of the planet, but saying "morning" to the person sitting right next to us has quietly become an ick.

That pattern is the reason for the title. Adoption is slow, and it's sticky. Slow, because the phone-in-the-pocket world didn't drop in a single keynote. It set over fifteen, twenty years, one habit at a time, until the sealed bubble stopped looking rude and started looking like manners. Sticky, because once a behavior sets that deep it doesn't leave when a new gadget shows up. It has to be replaced by something clearly better, and even then it goes down kicking.

So the first wave of glasses will look a little silly, the way early smartphones looked like toys next to a BlackBerry, and early Bluetooth headsets made everyone look like they were arguing with a ghost. We'll roll our eyes. And then one day we'll look up and the room will have changed while nobody sent a memo, exactly the way it happened last time. Seven million pairs is what the start of that looks like.

Back to the 90s

Here's the twist that keeps the whole thing honest. While all this new gear marches toward us, there's a real fondness for the 90s going around, and not only from people who lived them. A lot of it comes from people under 25 who weren't even born yet. Vinyl just passed a billion dollars in US sales for the first time since 1983, and most Gen Z vinyl buyers pick up a record at least once a month. Film cameras, dumb phones, going to a thing instead of streaming it. They're nostalgic for a decade they never had.

That's not random. It's a response to digital overdose, and let's be honest, AI overdose on top of it. When everything on the screen is infinite, personalized, and increasingly machine-made, the scarce thing becomes the opposite: something real, in a room, with other people. We half-forgot how much that mattered somewhere around COVID, when personal connection quietly got filed under "later." AI didn't kill those old ways. It reminded us they deserve their place back.

None of this means AI or digital is going anywhere, that's not the trade. Both things are true at once: more digital, and more hunger for the analog it can't fake. That hunger is the quiet engine behind the rise of experience marketing, and it's the other half of the title. The same slow, sticky adoption that took twenty years to seal us inside our phones is now making the opposite thing, a real experience you actually show up for, worth more every year. The label will keep shifting, experiential, immersive, experience marketing, whatever the next deck calls it. The word evolves. The thing underneath, giving people something real to stand inside, does not.

What I'm actually rooting for

Every shift so far bought convenience at the cost of presence. The phone gave us the whole world and quietly took the room we're standing in. What's genuinely interesting about screens, then context, then AR is that for the first time the technology has a reason to lift our heads back up instead of dragging them down. A display you glance through keeps you in the room. Context that understands where you are only works if you're actually there.

I'm not naive about it. We could just as easily build the next bubble, thinner and closer to the eyes, and sleepwalk into a carriage of people narrating their lives to an assistant nobody else can hear, which is just the Underground with extra steps. Which version we get isn't decided by the hardware. It's decided by whoever designs what it does with our attention. Same slow adoption either way, same stickiness once it lands, and the only real question is which habit we let set this time.

So if you take one thing from a man watching strangers avoid eye contact under London: we're in the window right now, while it still looks too early. That's the interesting part. Not the gadgets. The chance, for once, to let the next thing hand us back the person sitting next to us, instead of taking them away.

So here's my question for you, and I mean it as an actual question: when the glasses land, do we finally get our heads back up, or do we just build a thinner bubble? I don't think it's decided yet, and I read every reply. Tell me where you land. And if you're already building the real, in-the-room thing while it still looks early, that's the work I spend my days on at RealityMatters. Come find me.