David Mařák, CTO and Co-Founder of YORD – Interview Series

David Mařák is CTO and Co-Founder of YORD. With over a decade of experience in immersive technologies, he leads the studio’s technology strategy and development at the intersection of artificial intelligence, extended reality, spatial computing, and interactive digital experiences. His work spans AI-powered applications, virtual and augmented reality, digital humans, and real-time generative technologies.

YORD is a creative technology studio that designs and develops AI and XR experiences for brands and organizations. Its work includes interactive installations, immersive brand experiences, museum environments, training solutions, and custom digital products, combining creative development with emerging technologies.

YORD builds for Apple Vision Pro and other headsets. How do Samsung’s glasses compare from a developer’s perspective, and what do they mean for immersive retail?

Vision Pro is a closed, highly optimized device with a futuristic look, and as a developer, you know exactly what you’re working with. Samsung’s glasses are built to look like normal glasses, and Android XR will run on hardware from several manufacturers, so it’s more open and varied, and not perfectly tuned for any one device.

A few years ago I’d have seen that fragmentation as a big problem. Today I don’t think it matters that much. With AI in the development process, it’s a lot easier to optimize for a specific device, read through someone’s documentation, or port between platforms, so the open platform tends to win because more people build for it. In the long run I’d bet on Android XR for that reason. For immersive retail though, there’s nothing on these glasses right now. No display means we can’t build anything the customer would see.

Is there any retail interaction that becomes possible once people wear these glasses in a store, something a phone can’t do?

Not yet. I should say that I’m a fan of glasses in general. We’ve been living digital lives through our phones for 15 years, it’s just not comfortable, you have to look down at a small rectangle and hold it in one hand the whole time. Glasses are the natural next step.

But Samsung’s glasses don’t solve that. You can look at a product and ask Gemini about it without getting your phone out, which is nice, but the phone can already do the same thing; the camera has just moved to your nose. The interaction that would be new is looking at a product and seeing the price, material, reviews or stock availability directly on the shelf. Samsung’s glasses can recognize the product, and that’s where it ends.

What’s the biggest limitation of a display-free device for brands, and what should they do until display versions arrive?

You can’t show anything. You can have great product data, and a clever assistant behind it, and the customer still gets a spoken description instead of seeing the thing.

I wouldn’t build any immersive strategy around these glasses. If a brand wants to do XR, do it on hardware that supports XR today, and keep the content in a format that can move to other platforms later. Good 3D models of your products, clean product data, experiences that aren’t locked to one device. When light glasses with a real display arrive, and I think they will, that’s what you’ll be able to reuse.

Warby Parker stores are the demo site. Why does a physical store make sense for this launch?

I don’t see it as a testing ground so much as the place where the glasses get sold. They’re prescription glasses with a camera in them, and prescription glasses get sold at the optician. You try them on, they fit your lenses, you walk out wearing them. Samsung and Google needed a chain with hundreds of stores and their own optical labs, and Warby Parker is that. Meta did the same thing with Ray-Ban and EssilorLuxottica.

I think it’s the right call. Glasses are a fashion item and a medical device before they’re a gadget, and selling them in an electronics store would probably not work. It also tells you what the product is. The frames are what’s for sale, and Gemini is something you get with them.

Camera glasses make people uncomfortable. How should brands deal with that in stores and public spaces?

I don’t think the camera itself is the issue. We walk around with a phone camera in our hand all day, and nobody calls that a surveillance device. The glasses just move a camera you already have to a different place.

The difference is that with a phone you can see when someone is pointing it at something, and with glasses the people around you can’t tell. So, at minimum, there has to be a recording light that is bright, visible from the front, and can’t be turned off, and I’d prefer that to be a platform rule rather than something each manufacturer decides. Then there’s the question of what gets recorded, how long it’s stored, who has access to it, and what developers like us can see. Samsung and Google haven’t said much about any of that. Until they do, I wouldn’t build in-store experiences that rely on continuously watching the customer.

For retailers who want to do something useful today, what’s the low-hanging fruit?

Making existing product information available through voice, and then testing whether anyone actually prefers it to taking out their phone. I don’t see much more than that.

For any glasses project, the test is whether it does something better than what the customer already has in their pocket. If the same thing works just as well on a phone, there’s no reason to pay for a glasses version. If a retailer wants a real immersive experience, that’s possible today on other hardware, and we can build that. Trying to do XR on a device with no display will end up being a gimmick.

YORD works across many platforms. How does that shape the advice you give brands about investing in XR?

The main thing we’ve learned is not to mistake a hardware announcement for a development opportunity. Vision Pro, Quest and the others are quite different, but on all of them we can build something visual that reacts to the user’s surroundings. On Samsung’s glasses, we can’t, so before asking how to port an experience, you have to ask whether the device can run it at all.

Otherwise the advice hasn’t changed. Don’t tie your XR plans to a single manufacturer. We’ve been through enough hardware generations to know the devices will look different in two years. The content you’ve built and the users you’ve reached are what stays with you.

How do you measure whether an XR experience builds loyalty, compared to a normal digital touchpoint?

I wouldn’t count how many people tried it, because everyone tries new hardware once. I’d look at what happened afterward. Did they understand the product better? Did they decide faster? Did they buy? Did they come back? These are the same metrics you’d use for a website or an app, and the XR version has to beat them; otherwise, there’s no reason to do it.

With real XR, there’s a decent chance it does, because you’re showing someone the product in their own space rather than on a screen. With glasses that have no display, I’d be careful about promising anything like that. Measure it against a phone app and see what comes out.

What’s the biggest misconception brands have about XR right now, and does Samsung’s launch change it?

That anything with glasses, a headset, or AI in it is XR. It isn’t. XR refers to digital content that’s tied to the physical space around you, so the device has to understand the environment and be able to change what you see.

Google Glass had a display but almost no understanding of what you were looking at. Samsung’s glasses are the opposite; they understand the surroundings through the camera and Gemini but can’t show you anything. Each has one half of it. A few years ago, the industry put the metaverse label on a lot of things that had nothing to do with immersive computing, and I’m a bit worried we’re about to do the same with AI glasses. Samsung’s product might be a good wearable assistant. It’s not an XR device just because the name says so.

As a CTO, what are you watching over the next 6 to 12 months to tell whether XR glasses are heading for the mass market or staying niche?

Two things: whether the hardware gets there and whether developers get access.

On hardware, I think glasses will eventually replace the phone, because everything we do on a phone we’d rather do without holding it. What’s missing is a single device that has a see-through display, understands the space around you, and comes with a frame you can wear from morning to evening. Vision Pro, Galaxy XR or Quest are too heavy and too expensive for that. Samsung’s glasses are light enough but can’t show anything. Snap’s Specs, which shipped this autumn for around $2,200, are the closest so far. Still too expensive and a bit thick, but they have a real display, they understand the room, and we can develop for them. That’s the direction I’d expect things to go, and Samsung is currently behind it.

On developers, I want to see whether we’ll be able to ship our own apps, render spatial content, and work with the data the device uses to understand the environment, and whether the camera rules get written down. If the platforms open up, people will build on them quickly because development has become much cheaper with AI. If they stay closed around one assistant, we’ll end up with a slightly better Alexa.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to explore how XR, AI, and spatial computing can create useful retail and brand experiences should visit YORD.