Here's an irony so thick you could cut it with a velociraptor tooth: one of the people who helped build the most ambitious spatial computing device in history walked away convinced that the real future lives inside your pocket.
Mark Drummond spent his time at Apple leading the Character Intelligence Team - the folks behind the Encounter Dinosaurs demo that came preinstalled on the Vision Pro. You know, the one where a giant prehistoric creature gets uncomfortably close to your face and your brain momentarily forgets you're sitting on your couch in sweatpants. If anyone was drinking the spatial computing Kool-Aid, it should have been this guy.
The expensive headset that changed his mind about headsets
But according to Lowpass, Janko Roettgers' newsletter syndicated for The Verge, working on the Vision Pro gave Drummond something Apple probably didn't put in the project brief: an epiphany that didn't exactly align with Cupertino's preferred narrative. After going deep on what next-generation AR could do, he came out the other side thinking the humble smartphone still has enormous untapped potential.
This is the kind of plot twist that makes tech journalists do a double-take. We've been told for years that headsets and glasses are the inevitable evolution - that holding a rectangle of glass up to our faces is a primitive behaviour we'll look back on with embarrassment, like dial-up internet or cargo shorts (one of these is making a comeback, and it's not dial-up).
So what's he doing about it?
Drummond is now working on a new venture focused on bringing richer AR and character experiences to phones - a space that, let's be honest, has been criminally underexplored while everyone was busy arguing about whether a $3,499 headset was too heavy.
The logic isn't anti-innovation. It's more like... pragmatic idealism. Billions of people already have a powerful AR-capable computer in their hands. The Vision Pro, spectacular as it is, requires you to strap something to your face, empty your wallet, and occasionally explain to houseguests why you look like a ski goggle enthusiast who also works in finance.
Phones, meanwhile, are just there. Everywhere. All the time.
The real disruption hiding in plain sight
There's something almost rebellious about an AR veteran making this call. It suggests the lesson learned from building cutting-edge spatial experiences isn't "we need better headsets" - it's "we need to meet people where they actually are."
And where people actually are, statistically speaking, is staring at their phones. Which means the next big leap in augmented reality might not require you to buy anything new at all. Just wait for someone like Drummond to figure out how to put a dinosaur in your camera roll.
