News and Updates about Virtual Reality News

The new Apple Vision Pro headset that Apple is reportedly testing under the code name N224 might never reach shelves. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman describes the project as being on "life support," with no guarantee it ever launches.

XREAL has finally put a number on its long-teased Aura glasses: $1,279 for the base configuration, the company confirmed this week. That's roughly $20 less than Meta's $1,299.99 VR Glasses, according to The Verge and WIRED, both of which tested the hardware ahead of the announcement.

Pimax has unveiled the Crystal Pro, a wireless PC VR headset built around technology it calls Native Foveated Streaming, designed to send the GPU's native image to the headset within the eye-tracked focus area without the video encoding most wireless headsets rely on, according to Pimax. The announcement sets up a direct Pimax Crystal Pro vs Steam Frame contest for the future of wireless PC VR, arriving just over four weeks after Valve's headset went on sale.

Meta and ESPN have launched a live immersive college football program on Quest headsets, giving fans a new way to watch college football in VR on Meta Quest without waiting for a replay. The debut broadcast, a 180-degree stream of the No. 1 Texas Longhorns hosting Oklahoma in the Red River Rivalry at the Cotton Bowl, aired this past weekend, Meta said last week. The Golden Hat trophy was on the line, giving the format's debut a built-in marquee matchup. What Meta hasn't said: what the feature...

Reports about Nothing smart glasses surfaced last month, tucked into IDC's quarterly market breakdown under a headline that doubles as the only concrete claim circulating so far: "Nothing Wants to Put Smart Glasses on Your Face, and Two Pairs Could Be on the Way," according to IDC's Q2 2026 analysis. That's the extent of it. No specs, no pricing, no launch window has emerged to back the claim up.

XREAL's latest AR glasses promise a noticeably brighter picture without a higher price. The new XREAL 1 Pro+ brings a 1,200-nit peak display, improved 2D-to-3D conversion, and redesigned nose pads for $599, sharpening the experience of using a virtual screen for movies, games, and everyday computing.

Apple's Vision Products Group is hiring a "strategic product design leader" tasked with defining "the future of health, wellbeing, and fitness experiences across vision products," according to a listing surfaced in Bloomberg's Power On newsletter (9to5Mac, 1 day ago). The posting has fueled speculation about Apple Fitness+ on Apple Glasses, the company's rumored non-AR smart glasses still in development.

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?

Display-less smart glasses, the camera-and-microphone kind with no lens display, shipped 2.25 million units in the first three months of 2026, a 167% jump from the same quarter a year earlier, according to IDC data published in June 2026.

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.

HTC wants VIVE Eagle to be the smart glasses that finally get privacy right. The company says its AI-powered eyewear stores everything locally, skips ad tracking, and doesn't use customer data to train its models (HTC). It even ships with a light that switches on when the camera is recording. Judged purely on HTC smart glasses privacy features, that's a real step past the industry default of quietly uploading everything to the cloud. But look at who those features are built to reassure: the...

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...

Live coverage of Meta Connect 2026, updated Sept. 25.

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...

Insta360 will launch Spatial Capture in the United States on September 28, a feature that converts standard 360-degree footage into 3D scenes people can explore from different positions inside the company's mobile app.

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.

Meta Connect 2026 kicks off today, and Mark Zuckerberg's keynote starts at 7 p.m. ET / 4 p.m. PT, the same evening slot Meta used last year for the event's marquee address (Engadget, 5 days ago). Here's how to watch Meta Connect 2026 keynote live: register on Meta's official Connect site, or tune in through the Meta for Developers Facebook page (Engadget, today).

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.

VR Expert and Treeview have partnered to give enterprises an early way to evaluate, prototype, and build applications for XREAL AURA before the Android XR glasses reach general availability. According to VR Expert's partnership announcement, the program combines hardware evaluation and procurement with custom software development, enterprise integrations, rollout planning, and support.

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.

The visionOS 27 release date is reportedly Monday, September 14, 2026, according to 9to5Mac, which says the update will roll out to all Vision Pro users on that day, not a staggered rollout to select testers or regions. Apple has not confirmed the date itself. The company's only public commitment remains "this fall," made when it previewed the software three months ago (Apple Newsroom).

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.

Display-less smart glasses shipments jumped 167% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, hitting roughly 2.25 million units, nearly matching all of 2024's shipments in a single quarter (IDC, two months ago). The wider intelligent-eyewear market grew 83% year over year over the same period (Counterpoint Research, two months ago), and IDC now expects 13.6 million display-less units to ship this year, climbing to 27.3 million by 2030 (IDC, two months ago).

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.

Ask a virtual assistant in a mixed-reality workspace to move a panel "over there," and a speech-only system can only talk back. AgentHands, a research system for AI agents in extended reality (XR), does something different: it points, then places its hand roughly where "there" is.

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.

Hilton used to spend four hours training staff on customer-service basics in a classroom. Working with training firm SweetRush, the hotel chain cut that down to 20 minutes using a system where trainees speak their responses to a digital guest inside a 3D environment, accessible by VR headset or a standard web browser, and receive a pass/fail grade plus personalized feedback from a large language model (Hotel Management Network, last year). That's the kind of result that makes virtual reality...

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...

AR glasses don't just show imperfect images. They actively mislead the brain about where things are in space. A study published earlier this year has now documented that failure precisely enough to give hardware engineers a concrete target, and separate work on display components and waveguide optics is beginning to address it at the hardware level, though no complete solution exists yet.

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.

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.

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...

Apple's cheaper Vision Pro has been scrapped. Last month, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported that incoming CEO John Ternus signed off on canceling both a second-generation Vision Pro and a lighter "Vision Air," redirecting the company's headset roadmap toward smart glasses instead, according to MacRumors. For anyone tracking why the cheaper Apple Vision Pro scrapped timeline kept slipping, the reasons were already visible in the supply chain data: displays too expensive to source from anyone but one...

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.

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...