Though the Next Big Thing won’t appear for a while, we know pretty much what it will look like: a lightweight, always-on wearable that obliterates the divide between the stuff we see on screens and the stuff we see when we look up from our screens. “We know what we really want: AR glasses,” said Oculus’s chief scientist Michael Abrash at Facebook’s F8 developers’ conference in April. “They aren’t here yet, but when they arrive they’re going to be the great transformational technologies of the next 50 years.” He predicted that in the near future, “instead of carrying stylish smartphones everywhere, we’ll be wearing stylish glasses.” And he added that “these glasses will offer AR, VR, and everything in between, and we’ll wear them all day and we’ll use them in every aspect of our lives.”

Steven Levy is Backchannel's founder and Editor in Chief. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

That may seem surprising to those still thinking of mixed-reality wearables as a series of over-promises: Google Glass’s humiliating stumble; Snapchat’s low-selling Spectacles; Magic Leap’s epically late headset; and, um, the disappointing initial sales of Oculus’s own virtual-reality headsets. But you can write those off as baby steps, because all the big companies are going long on augmented reality. In 2018, you’ll see the building blocks on your mobile phones. These are just the earliest attempts at a new technology platform that will eventually have its unveiling as a mainstream, must-have wearable.

Indeed, an augmented reality Manhattan Project has become one of those things—like streaming video entertainment, search engines, and a phalanx of Washington lobbyists—that every self-respecting tech oligarch must have these days. And as far as the future is concerned, tech’s Big Five believe it may be the most important.

There’s been an increasing consensus that artificial reality—the technology that tricks the senses into seeing, hearing, and interacting with digital objects and scenarios as if they are as substantial as the furniture we sit on and the people across from us—will become the Fourth Platform in computing. Each of the previous three uber-platforms, coming roughly every 15 years or so, has been an epochal event, offering an opportunity for reshuffling the power rankings of tech companies. And each threatened the existence of industry leaders blinded by the false sunshine of the Innovator’s Dilemma, which holds that the winners in one round of tech progress are too locked into their victories to bet on the next wave.

In the early eighties, personal computing destroyed mini-computer companies, and launched Apple and Microsoft. The mid-nineties saw the explosion of the internet, bushwhacking endless industries and spawning giants like Google and Amazon. The 2007 iPhone kicked off the mobile era; companies going all-in thrived, while those that came late to mobile (yes, I mean, you, Microsoft) suffered.

In the short run, we’re stuck with a landscape ruled by five behemoths (Microsoft has recovered enough to join the cabal). These companies appear so powerful that it would be easy to miss how fragile their futures may be. A new technology platform always forces a new round of musical chairs as the companies that are the first to recognize it and build the tools to support it dominate a new wave. Augmented reality is that new platform. (Some even call it the final computing platform, but that’s really reserved for the inevitable brain implant, which is easily another 15 years out.)