The Latest on Virtual Reality News

With visionOS 27 beta 4 now in circulation, no build-specific release notes have been published at the time of writing. That gap makes this a reasonable moment to assess what the cycle has actually documented. Beta 3 notes and Apple's WWDC26 developer sessions tell a consistent story: this is a platform-hardening effort, not a consumer feature push. For Vision Pro owners who aren't shipping apps, the public beta remains the right entry point, as iThinkDifferent reported two weeks ago.

New York became the first US state to ban smart glasses from all its courthouses this week, with the policy taking effect July 20 and covering every person who enters any of the state's 1,240-plus courts, according to Bloomberg Law. The New York smart glasses courthouse ban does not create a new legal prohibition. New York courts have long forbidden "taking photographs, films or videotapes, or audiotaping, broadcasting or telecasting, in a courthouse including any courtroom, office or hallway...

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 Even Realities G2 smart glasses launched into a market where Meta has sold over 7 million camera-equipped Ray-Bans and holds an estimated 80% of AI glasses sales, according to BBC reporting from earlier this year. Even Realities is betting that a camera-free design can appeal to professionals who want heads-up information without the social friction of recording hardware. That bet is looking less contrarian than it did a year ago.

Halliday opened pre-orders today for the G2, camera-free AI smart glasses built around a single workplace promise: that an AI processing your meeting audio in real time can catch the decisions that slip through, the action items nobody writes down, and the topics that got tabled but never resolved, according to Android Authority. The glasses cost $599, ship in September, and carry no camera a deliberate choice Halliday says was made for both privacy and battery efficiency, per The Verge.

Last week, the Olympic Council of Asia granted virtual taekwondo full medal status at the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games, making it the first VR-based martial art to earn that recognition, The Korea Herald reported. The announcement landed with the usual institutional fanfare. But the medal status is almost a distraction from the more interesting question: what problem does virtual taekwondo actually solve, and for whom?

Meta quietly launched the Meta Pocket app on June 29, with no press release, no announcement, and no official statement from the company. App intelligence firm Appfigures spotted it first. The app centers on AI-generated interactive experiences called "gizmos" — users type a prompt, get something playable, and post it to a scrollable feed. US-based users trying to find it on Google Play this week ran into a message saying the app "isn't available in your country," and Meta's own help center...

Meta spent the past year building a credible case that smart glasses are serious tools for disabled users. Then it announced that one of its most assistive features will soon be capped at three hours of free use per month. That combination, a feature set with real accessibility value followed by subscription-metered access, creates a specific opening for Apple to define its eventual glasses product around a completely different philosophy.

John Ternus Apple Vision Pro Comments: What the Record Shows

There is no Apple Vision Pro price increase to report. The M5 model still starts at $3,499 in the U.S., identical to what the original cost at launch. What has shifted is everything around that number. The XR market, as tracked by IDC this month, is growing fast and compressing prices simultaneously. Apple's sticker hasn't moved. Its relative value has.

Snap earns almost nothing outside of advertising. Bloomberg reported earlier this year that the company's revenue growth had stabilized in the low-to-mid single digits, a ceiling that reflects something deeper than execution quality: competing for the same brand and direct-response budgets as Meta and Google, on a fraction of their data footprint and targeting precision. That fight doesn't get more winnable through better product. The constraints are structural.

Display-less smart glasses shipped 2.25 million units in Q1 2026 alone, nearly matching the 2.7 million the entire category moved across all of 2024, according to IDC. IDC's data suggests smart glasses are breaking out of niche XR territory this year, with growth that analysts expected to unfold over years compressing into quarters.

A startup founded by a former Apple Vision Pro team lead launched its Pixi iOS AR messaging app on the App Store today, letting users send AI-powered augmented reality characters through iMessage. The characters appear through the recipient's iPhone camera, react to their surroundings, interpret facial expressions, and respond to objects in the room, TechCrunch reported. The app is called Pixi Garden, and no installation is required to receive a message only the sender needs the app, according...

AWE 2026 smart glasses are no longer a single product category. As Snap CEO Evan Spiegel takes the stage in Long Beach tomorrow morning, the hardware on display at this year's Augmented World Expo splits cleanly into three tiers AI camera eyewear, tethered AR glasses, and fully standalone AR computers each with a different capability ceiling and a different set of risks for the people around them. The industry is moving fast on the hardware. It is not moving nearly as fast on the consent...

How Disney Used Apple Vision Pro to Solve a Specific Production Problem Inside EPCOT's Soarin' Overhaul

If Qualcomm announces new XR silicon at Meta Connect, it would land in a market that looks nothing like it did two years ago. Global XR device shipments grew 44.4% in 2025, but VR and mixed-reality headsets declined across the same period; every point of category growth came from smart glasses, according to IDC. That context matters for reading any Qualcomm XR announcement at Meta Connect. No confirmed product, partnership, or launch has been announced as of this writing. What follows examines...

Functional facial recognition infrastructure was embedded in the Meta AI companion app for Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and distributed to millions of users before Meta quietly stripped it out less than 48 hours after public exposure, EFF reported two days ago. The Ray-Ban Meta facial recognition code was present in the app and verified as working by researchers. It was not yet accessible to ordinary users as a consumer-facing feature. Those are two different things.

Pennsylvania state Rep. Joe Ciresi introduced House Bill 2603 last Thursday, requiring smart glasses manufactured, sold, or used in the state to display a visible indicator whenever they record or stream audio or video. Disabling or covering that indicator would be illegal under the bill. No equivalent requirement exists at the federal level; the U.S. has no national standard obligating wearable device makers to include recording indicators at all, Android Authority reported this week.