Picture a guest who sits down, glances at the table and sees tonight’s specials appear on it, each dish at the size it will be served. They ask, out loud, which one is spicy, whether the risotto has nuts, what goes with the lamb. They order without waving anyone over.
That is not a product anyone can buy today, and it would be dishonest to promise a date. But the pieces are being built, and some of them already work on the phone in your guest’s pocket. The restaurants that will be ready for the next screen are the ones building the right foundations now.
From phones to faces
For the last decade, augmented reality has lived mostly on phones. Point the camera at a room and the phone draws something into it: furniture before you buy it, a route in a city, a dish on a table. Phones will stay the main way people use AR for years, because everyone already carries one.
The next step is already here in early form. Apple’s Vision Pro headset places 3D objects in the room and opens the same USDZ model files that iPhones show in AR. Google has announced Android XR as a platform for headsets and glasses, and Meta and Snap have both shown glasses that overlay digital content on the world. Headsets are heavy and glasses are early, but the direction is clear: digital things are moving off the screen and into the space around us.
For restaurants, that shift matters because a menu is one of the few things everyone reads in the same place, at the same table, at the moment of decision.
What a menu could look like through glasses
Nobody knows exactly how it will feel, but a few things are easy to imagine:
- Dishes previewed where they will be served, at true size, without anyone holding up a phone.
- Questions answered by voice, from the restaurant’s own menu data: ingredients, allergens, pairings.
- A personal view of the same menu, in the guest’s language, with their dietary needs highlighted.
- Ordering and paying from the table without waiting for the card machine.
Every one of those already exists on a phone. TruePlate shows dishes in 3D and AR at true size, answers guests from the dishes you have published with the AI menu, translates the menu, and on Ultra runs table ordering and payment. Glasses change the screen, not the ingredients.
What will not change
Whatever the device, a few things stay exactly as important as they are today. Guests will still need accurate names, prices, descriptions and allergens. A 3D dish will still need to be your dish, captured from your plate, at its real size, because a flattering model that does not match what arrives is worse than no model at all.
And hospitality will still be done by people. The best use of new technology in a dining room is to take the repetitive work off staff, not to replace the welcome, the recommendation or the moment someone checks that a table is happy.
The standards that carry forward
The practical reason to start now is that 3D assets are portable. Two open formats carry most of the world’s AR content:
- USDZ, the packaged form of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description, which Apple uses across iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro. OpenUSD is now developed by an alliance that includes Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk and NVIDIA.
- glTF, an open standard from the Khronos Group, often called the JPEG of 3D. Its binary form, GLB, is what Android and the web use.
Every dish captured in TruePlate is stored in both. Nobody can promise how every future device will behave, but models in open, widely supported formats are the safest bet there is.
The same goes for menu data. Search engines and AI assistants already read menus, and they read structured data best. TruePlate publishes every public menu with schema.org menu markup, so the dishes, sections and prices are machine-readable as well as human-readable.
How to future-proof your menu today
- Capture your signature dishes in 3D now. The asset outlives any single device, and it pays off on phones straight away.
- Keep captures true to the plate. Recapture when the recipe or the plating changes.
- Keep menu data complete and structured: descriptions, allergens, prices and translations, maintained in one place.
- Prefer web menus and open formats over anything that locks your dishes into one app or one device.
- Measure what guests do today. AR sessions per dish tell you which dishes benefit most, long before glasses are common.
A realistic timeline
Phones will remain the main screen for AR for years, and glasses will arrive the way smartphones did: slowly, then everywhere. There is no need to wait for them, and no reason to spend money on a device that your guests do not own yet.
What makes sense is building a library of accurate 3D dishes and clean menu data that earns its keep on phones now. When the next screen arrives, your menu is already on it. If you are new to the idea, start with what an AR menu is and how it works.
Questions restaurants ask
Do guests need AR glasses to use an AR menu today?
No. Today's AR menus run on the phones guests already carry, straight from the browser. Glasses and headsets are an extra screen for the same 3D dishes, not a requirement.
Will 3D models made today work on future devices?
Nobody can promise how every future device will work, but models stored in open formats like USDZ and glTF are already read by today's headsets and 3D platforms, which makes them the safest bet available.
Is it too early for restaurants to invest in 3D menus?
Not if the 3D menu pays off on phones now. Guests use AR on their phones today; being ready for glasses is a bonus, not the reason to start.