Many manufacturers have used XR for years, albeit on a small scale. It’s a familiar story: software is painstakingly developed and configured for a new workflow. It’s then deployed on devices that most end users (and IT departments) have never seen before, let alone used. A few tech-savvy users engage quickly, but adoption soon flatlines from the friction of poor user experience. Projects languish in POC purgatory.

How times have changed.

2024 brought tectonic shifts in the XR landscape — we’ve seen more change in the last 12 months than the past 12 years.

Groundbreaking AR devices like HoloLens and Magic Leap are no longer available. VR devices without color passthrough are on the way out. Both have been replaced by a new class of headsets that do both AR and VR, are extremely easy to use, and have a price/performance ratio that’s compelling for consumers and downright cheap for enterprise.

Exemplified by Meta’s Quest 3, this class of headsets is game-changing. It brings XR out of the lab and into workers’ hands, much like PCs brought computing from the lab to workers’ desks. If the past is any indication, we're in for disruptive gains in productivity—the same gains promised by those POCs that never quite escaped the lab.

Guess what else a new generation of hardware brings? A new generation of software. And the XR industry needs it badly.

Much of today’s XR software is developed in-house—often at great expense, and for devices that are no longer available. And since XR devices are so fragmented, there’s no straightforward path to port those solutions to new devices. Yet just like PCs spawned a new generation of desktop software, today’s XR solutions will be replaced by next-gen SaaS.

This software brings all the affordances of modern 2D SaaS that we take for granted, but somehow don’t expect (or haven’t achieved) with XR. I’m talking about the basics:

• Downloading apps from app stores

• Creating an account and getting started for free

• Welcoming, easy-to-use UIs and tutorials

• Working seamlessly across different devices, whether in meetings or offline

• Cloud-first architecture so everyone is working with the same data

• Integrations with other enterprise applications

If this sounds like almost every app you use, you’re right! That’s the point. XR software hasn’t yet delivered the most basic attributes we expect from modern SaaS.

But it’s coming.

At Campfire, we’re leading the way with a fundamental yet powerful XR capability: sharing 3D models as easily as we share text or images today.

For manufacturers, this delivers a new collaboration layer that follows your digital thread across the product lifecycle. Applications that once required millions of dollars to build can now be done in minutes — without coding, cost, or hassle. Whether you’ve been in XR for a decade or you’re just getting started, there’s never been a better time to start new projects.

With a new class of both hardware and software, XR is ready to scale — and to bring long-promised, transformative benefits across your entire enterprise.

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This article first appeared in Unity's 2025 Industry Trends Report.