Spatial computing.
Faces lose, maps win.

Meta's Reality Labs lost $10.70 for every dollar of revenue it brought in last quarter. And Meta is winning.

Its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses sold more than 7 million pairs last year, giving it about 70% of the smart-glasses market. The headsets lost. Apple's Vision Pro is a niche product, and lightweight glasses with a camera, speakers, and an AI assistant now make up most of the face-worn computers that ship. So the consumer fight has a winner, and the winner is still losing more than $4 billion a quarter.

That's only one half of spatial computing, though, and it's the smaller half. Spatial computing means computers that understand and work with 3D space. On your face, that's headsets and smart glasses (AR and VR, or XR if you like acronyms) that overlay information on what you see or let an assistant see it for you. Out in the world, it's laser scanners, lidar, and software that build precise 3D models of buildings, roads, factories, and power grids, often called digital twins. That second half gets far less attention and has far more paying customers.

Spatial computing stocks haven't sorted this out yet. EssilorLuxottica, which makes Meta's glasses, is down more than half from its high on worries that the glasses boom is slowing, and the industrial software makers are down too. Only Ouster, the lidar maker, has really been rewarded.

The money in spatial computing for 2027 is in teaching machines to understand space, not putting screens on faces. The list is grouped by which side each company is on: the face, the map, the sensors, and the private companies on both sides.

Glasses beat headsets. Now someone has to make them profitable.

Meta Platforms NASDAQ: META

Meta Platforms owns the consumer side of spatial computing. Reality Labs revenue grew 16% last quarter on stronger glasses sales, even as Quest headset sales fell. It also lost $4.6 billion, and Meta has said 2026 losses will be about the same as 2025's, roughly $19 billion.

At its September conference, Meta expanded its Ray-Ban Display glasses beyond the U.S. and introduced a 100-gram pair of VR glasses for spring 2027, at $1,299. Meta is spending like the glasses are the next phone. It's here because if anyone makes that true, it'll be Meta, and nobody else can afford to try at this scale.

EssilorLuxottica EPA: EL

EssilorLuxottica owns Ray-Ban and Oakley, makes Meta's smart glasses, and sells them through its own stores and optical retailers around the world. It's the one company in this market that gets paid for every pair, and its AI-glasses revenue almost doubled in the second quarter.

The stock has more than halved from its high anyway. Investors worry the glasses boom is slowing and that the cost of building them is eating into margins. A public fight with the Del Vecchio family's holding company over the CEO's future hasn't helped. For a company with 7 million units of a new product category last year, that's a steep discount.

Qualcomm NASDAQ: QCOM

Qualcomm makes the chips inside nearly every face-worn computer that isn't made by Apple. Its new Snapdragon Reality Elite chip powers Meta's upcoming VR glasses and XREAL's Aura glasses, and it co-built Android XR with Google and Samsung. Whoever wins the glasses war, Qualcomm probably supplies them. Spatial computing is a small slice of a big chip company, but it's a slice that grows no matter which brand does.

Snap NYSE: SNAP

Snap has spent a decade on augmented reality glasses, and in September it started taking orders for Specs, its first consumer version, at $2,195. They ship later this fall in the U.S., the U.K. and France.

That's roughly seven times the price of Ray-Ban Meta glasses, for a full overlay display instead of an assistant in your ear. The stock is down about 30% this year. Specs is a bet that consumers want more than audio and a camera, and the market for that has been small so far.

These companies build 3D models of the physical world for the people who design, build and run it. They sell by subscription, and the customers are engineers, not consumers. That makes them the steadier half of spatial computing stocks.

Bentley Systems NASDAQ: BSY

Bentley Systems makes the software engineers use to design and manage roads, bridges, railways, water systems and power grids, increasingly as live digital twins. Recurring revenue is about $1.5 billion a year, growing 12%, and customers spend 9% more each year than the year before.

That's a steady business in a market that has to spend on aging infrastructure regardless of the economy. The stock is down about 16% this year, which looks more like software-sector gloom than anything wrong at Bentley.

Trimble NASDAQ: TRMB

Trimble supplies the GPS positioning, scanning and software that construction crews, surveyors and farmers use to know exactly where they are and what they're building. Annual recurring revenue reached $2.5 billion, up 14%.

The stock is down about 27% this year, and Trimble wrote down $562 million on its trucking-software business partly because of that drop. It responded with a $1 billion buyback. The construction and geospatial core is the part that matters here, and it's growing.

Hexagon STO: HEXA-B

Hexagon spun off its software business, now called Octave, in May. What's left calls itself the global leader in measurement technologies: laser scanners, metrology systems and reality-capture tools that measure physical objects and spaces to fractions of a millimeter.

That's the hardware end of the map, and it's profitable. Continuing operations grew 12% organically last quarter at a 26% operating margin. Hexagon is the cleanest way to own the instruments that turn the physical world into data.

Robots, cars and machines need to see in 3D. That's lidar's job, and these two companies make the lidar. They're the spatial computing stocks most tied to robots.

Ouster NASDAQ: OUST

Ouster makes lidar sensors, which map their surroundings with laser pulses, and since buying Stereolabs it also sells 3D cameras. It shipped more than 17,000 sensors last quarter, revenue grew 56%, and gross margin was 49%.

It's selling into robots, warehouses, smart infrastructure and defense rather than mass-market cars, and the market has paid for that. The stock has doubled this year, and Ouster raised $192 million in July.

Hesai NASDAQ: HSAI

Hesai is the world's volume lidar maker. It shipped more than 628,000 units last quarter, up 78%, mostly to Chinese carmakers, and has been profitable on a GAAP basis for five quarters running.

The newer business is Kosmo, a platform that turns lidar scans into ready-to-use 3D models for AI and robotics, which starts contributing revenue this quarter. The stock is down about 31% this year, but Hesai is guiding to more than 38% growth next quarter.

Anduril (Private)

Anduril took over the Army's soldier headset program from Microsoft in 2025. The original program cost about $1.8 billion, and the Army judged its headsets too expensive to produce at scale. Anduril, working with Meta, won a $159 million prototyping contract for the replacement last September. It's prototyping, not production, and a production decision may be years away.

Magic Leap (Private)

Magic Leap spent fifteen years building its own AR headsets. In July it gave up on that and pivoted to supplying the waveguides, the see-through lenses that make AR displays work, to other companies, starting with Google. It's the clearest sign yet that the value in AR glasses is in the optics and chips, not the brand.

Niantic Spatial (Private)

Niantic Spatial was spun out when Niantic sold Pokémon Go and its other games to Scopely for $3.5 billion in 2025. What it kept is a 3D map of the world built from more than 30 billion photos taken by players, precise enough to tell a device exactly where it is and which way it's facing. It's building a business selling that map to companies and machines.

Spatial computing's real market is machines, not faces.

The consumer fight was about putting a computer on your face. The bigger market may be giving one a sense of space without a face at all: a warehouse robot, a delivery drone, a humanoid, an AI agent planning a repair. All of them need what this list's map and sensor companies produce, a precise, current 3D model of the world and a way to know exactly where they are in it.

That's why Hesai is turning lidar scans into AI-ready 3D assets, Bentley is pitching "infrastructure AI," and Niantic Spatial is selling its map to machines rather than gamers. Even Meta's glasses are, in a sense, millions of cameras walking around the world.

The face computer still has to win over people one pair at a time. The map gets more valuable every time another robot ships. In 2027, the money in spatial computing stocks will follow the robots.