2026 will likely be a breakthrough year for Augmented Reality. Prediction:
Once shared simulation layers (AI agents, AR overlays, personalized world models) begin to overlap, reality itself becomes a negotiable social contract, continuously rewritten through interaction. Each person’s “version” of the world is like a branch in a Git repository - reality becomes a distributed version - control system for perception.
The new skill, therefore, isn’t storytelling but merging: the ability to reconcile divergent perceptual branches into a functional shared world without erasing difference. The next social UX challenge isn’t creating new worlds - it’s handling merge conflicts of reality.
And when consensus reality finally collapses under its own recursion, we’ll toast the chaos. The real enlightenment will come when we stop resolving merge conflicts altogether and just let the paradox compile.