I spent the last week in Vietnam. I didn't expect to come across a dedicated VR event right outside my hotel - but I did. And I loved it. 

No billion-dollar announcements. No fashion brand partnerships. No leaked renders of frames that look suspiciously like something Meta already makes. Just specialist vendors in a hall - in a country that most Western XR coverage doesn't think to mention - treating spatial computing as an infrastructure question, not a consumer gadget conversation.

It's worth sitting with that image for a moment.

Vietnam is not the first country you'd expect to be hosting dedicated XR events. It doesn't have a Samsung or an XREAL. It doesn't have a government ministry framing smart glasses as a national growth engine the way South Korea does.

What it does have is a technology sector that has learned, repeatedly, that waiting for the West to define the future is a losing strategy - and a growing cohort of builders who are paying attention to what's coming before it arrives.

Meanwhile in Australia, the conversation about XR in most boardrooms hasn't started yet.

This isn't a criticism. It's a pattern. Australia has world-class XR talent, genuine research capability, and a Zero Latency sitting in its backyard that is the global benchmark for location-based VR. What it consistently lacks is the institutional urgency that turns awareness into action.

The week that South Korea ran a government-backed metaverse festival with 140 companies and a dedicated smart glasses zone, Vietnam was hosting XR conversations of its own, and Samsung was confirming a July launch date for glasses that will be in Asian retail stores before the year is out.

The question for Australia isn't whether it knows VR is coming.

It's whether it will still be watching when everyone else has already moved in.

🤩 A passionate team specialising immersive experience.