The Latest on Virtual Reality News

Watching a 3D movie no longer requires a specialized television or a trip to the theater. Wearable displays now make it possible to enjoy stereoscopic films almost anywhere, but choosing between XREAL glasses and Apple's Vision Pro involves more than comparing screen quality. The two devices differ considerably in the movies they can play, how viewers access them, and the equipment required.

Three cardiomyopathy patients who had refused cardiac MRI scans because of claustrophobia put on VR headsets, trained inside a simulated hospital and scanner, and then, on exam day, climbed into the real machine and finished their scans without cancellations or complications. It is direct, if extremely narrow, evidence that virtual reality for MRI anxiety might help patients who otherwise cannot tolerate the scan.

New York Times Cooking is coming to Meta's AI glasses with a new hands-free mode designed specifically for following recipes while cooking.

This fall, Snap will finally sell a consumer version of the augmented reality glasses it has spent more than half a decade building. The price is $2,195, arriving after two generations of Specs that never made it past a small circle of developers (The Verge, yesterday). So what can Snap Specs do that you could actually use the day they ship, versus what Snap has only shown off in a controlled demo?

Norway is moving to tighten its rules for smart glasses, with facial recognition emerging as the clearest potential target. The government is considering a ban on features that identify other people in public, but it has not proposed outlawing smart glasses or wearable cameras themselves.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel fielded direct questions about Snap Specs preorder interest on Monday's Q2 earnings call and gave investors no hard numbers in response. Asked about demand ahead of a planned September hands-on event for the AR glasses, he offered a read on sentiment instead of a metric: "What we're hearing from folks is really that they want to try Specs."

Three years after Meta launched AI-powered Ray-Ban glasses in partnership with the eyewear brand, the backlash was loud enough that even the staid Financial Times ran the nickname critics had settled on: "pervert glasses." Today, Meta answers with something that would have seemed almost beside the point back then: a version with no camera at all. Ray-Ban Meta Audio, unveiled today, is the company's first entry into camera-free smart glasses, and it raises a question that outlasts any single...

Apple plans to unveil its first smart glasses at WWDC in June 2027, with consumer sales following later that year, the clearest Apple smart glasses release date reported so far, according to The Korea Herald (two months ago) and BetaNews (two months ago). That target has already slipped once from an earlier late-2026 unveil with early-2027 shipping, and the delay sits at the center of the story behind Apple smart glasses 2027: a bet that privacy restrictions, possibly including no camera at...

The claim reads like a highlight-reel moment: a VR modder throws virtual models at 3D printer, and the print supposedly starts before the object even finishes its arc. No video, account, or creator statement accompanies it, so it's treated here as unverified, not as a confirmed event with a citation waiting to be found.

Supernatural's Meta-operated app keeps running through December 3, 2026, but anyone who wants to keep using it afterward will need a new account and should expect to pay roughly double what they pay today. That's the practical shape of the Supernatural VR fitness app reboot, which relaunches as an independent company called Supernatural Health this fall, according to UploadVR and The Verge.

Meta Connect 2026 begins Sept. 23, arriving after years of scrutiny over how Meta's smart glasses can record people without their knowledge or consent, as PCMag reported last week. Reporting suggests the company's response could include a new product: a camera-free pair of glasses that removes the most visible trigger for the backlash.

Google Translate's Live Translate Android XR upgrade could give future Android XR glasses users a choice: translate only the person facing them, or every voice within earshot.

Apple released visionOS 27 beta 6 to developers on August 17, beta 7 on August 24, and beta 8 on August 31, keeping a steady weekly cadence heading into the fall release. Apple's developer portal identifies beta 8 as build 24M5361a, but the latest coverage does not identify any major beta-8-specific feature additions.

Sixteen athletes from 15 countries will compete for a single gold medal when virtual taekwondo makes its first appearance as an official medal event at the Asian Games, part of the Aichi-Nagoya Games that open on September 19 (The Korea Times). It is the first time a virtual reality-based martial art has been added to the Games program, according to industry sources cited by The Korea Herald.

Smart glasses have stopped being a concept and started being a product category. Meta's Ray-Ban and Oakley partnerships moved from niche curiosity to mainstream retail over the past year, according to an EFF analysis from earlier this year, which identified Meta as the biggest company in the category with the most popular options on the market. Google confirmed at I/O 2026 that Android XR audio glasses arrive this fall, designed, as Google put it, to "deliver help in the moment without taking...

Early reviews of the Xreal XBX a01+ landed this week with unusual consensus for a product category that usually divides testers sharply. Across Tom's Guide, The Verge, Gizmodo, PCMag, and Lifehacker, reviewers broadly agreed: the a01+ succeeds not because it does everything, but because Xreal made disciplined cuts. Spatial tracking, electronic dimming, and an internal battery are all gone. The display and the weight are not.

Samsung and Google previewed Galaxy Glasses at I/O in May with a live translation demo that, according to VR.org, nothing else in the smart glasses category currently matches for polish. Meta holds roughly 82% of the global market and is already shipping at scale, per Counterpoint Research via VR.org. Samsung Galaxy Glasses have not shipped a single unit. That gap is the whole story heading into Galaxy Unpacked on July 22 in London, where confirmed specs, pricing, and developer platform details...

The original Pokémon Go reveal trailer, released in 2015, ended with a scene that looked more like a fantasy than a product roadmap: hundreds of players flooding Times Square together to bring down a Mewtwo. It was the central premise rendered as spectacle. When the game launched in 2016, the game was nowhere near capable of supporting that kind of synchronized public event.