AR Development

San Francisco-based XR glasses company VITURE announced it’s secured $100 million in Series B financing, which the company says will aid in global expansion of its consumer XR glasses.

Viture initially announced in October 2024 it successfully secured a Series B, however now the company reveals its most recent tranche has brought the Series B total to $100 million, bringing overall funding to $121.5 million, according to Crunch Base data.

Previous investors include Singtel Innov8, BlueRun Ventures, BAI Capital, Verity Ventures, with the company noting that some strategic investors in the Series B “prefer to remain undisclosed at this time.”

The company says its Series B will allow it to expand its consumer XR glasses globally through retail and distribution networks, grow its enterprise offerings, and further develop its hardware and AI-powered software ecosystems.

This follows the July announcement of the company’s Luma series and Beast, phone/PC-tethered XR glasses that use bird bath-style optics, which the company is targeting towards casual content consumption and productivity.

Meanwhile, the XR glasses segment is heating up, although not uniformly in the direction of the sort of casual content-focused specs that Viture is developing.

More precisely, smart glasses with heads-up displays (i.e. not augmented reality) appear to be the next hot commodity among Meta, Google, Amazon and possibly even Apple, which generally see them as stepping stones to all-day wearable AR glasses of the future.

These sorts of smart glasses are very different from Viture’s however, or full-AR glasses, like Meta’s Orion prototype; smart glasses are essentially designed to offload daily tasks from the user’s smartphone, such as notifications, turn-by-turn directions, AI queries, calls, as well as photo and video capture.

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Check out this handy primer on the differences between smart glasses and AR glasses to learn more.

Amazon is reportedly developing a pair of consumer smart glasses which is slated to rival Meta’s rumored ‘Hypernova’ smart glasses with display, according to a report by The Information.

Citing two people with direct knowledge of the plans, The Information maintains the glasses, internally codenamed ‘Jayhawk’, are set to include include microphones, speakers, a camera, and a monocular, full-color display.

The report maintains Amazon is eyeing a consumer launch of Jayhawk in late 2026 or early 2027, however the price point is currently unknown.

Equally uncertain is whether Jayhawk will be marketed under Amazon’s ‘Echo Frames’ line, first introduced in 2019, including voice-controlled frames and music playback, calls, and smart home control powered by Alexa.

Now in its third generation, launched in late 2023, Echo Frames offer essentially the same set of features as the first and second, with the notable outlier being any sort of camera (or display) for photos and video capture.

Additionally, The Information reports that Amazon is also creating smart glasses for its delivery drivers, said to be bulkier and less sleek than the consumer ‘Jayhawk’ model for consumers.

Codenamed ‘Amelia’, the glasses are reportedly set to provide instructions to help sort and deliver packages. Those are said to rollout as soon as Q2 2026, and include an initial production run of 100,000 units.

In contrast, recent reports from supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman maintain Meta is nearly ready to begin mass production of its own smart glasses with monocular display.

Internally codenamed ‘Hypernova’, and possibly marketed as ‘Celeste’, Meta’s forthcoming smart glasses are expected to cost around $800, according to Kuo.

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The Information maintains in its reporting that the glasses will be “augmented reality”, however the device’s description puts it squarely in the smart glasses segment.

In short, AR glasses overlay spatially anchored 3D digital content into the real environment, while smart glasses mainly provide heads-up information or notifications, either by monoscopic or even stereoscopic displays. You can learn more about the difference between AR and smart glasses here.

Rokid, the China and US-based AR startup, launched a Kickstarter campaign last week for Rokid Glasses, frontrunning the competition with a pair of smart glasses housing green monochrome displays. Now, the crowdfunding campaign has surpasses $1 million, doubling the amount it garnered within its first 24 hours.

If Rokid Glases’ recent performance on Kickstarter is anything to go by, there’s going to be an unmistakable demand for smart glasses that offer more than an ‘audio-only’ experience, like you get with Ray-Ban Meta and the recently launched Oakley Meta HSTN glasses. Google is planning them, and Meta is rumored to have their own in the works.

Now, less than a week since its launch on Kickstarter, the display-clad smart glasses have topped $8.7 million Hong Kong dollars (~$1.2 million USD). And there’s still 38 days to go in the campaign, leaving plenty of room to run until close on October 10th.

You can catch all of the specs and features here, although here’s the short of it: Rokid Glasses run a Qualcomm Snapdragon AR1 and NXP’s RT600, which drive its dual green micro-LED displays, which Rokid says can deliver 1500 nits of brightness—all at 49g and a formfactor that’s impressively normal.

Onboard is a single 12MP camera sensor, which features a 109° field of view, low-light HDR and digital video stabilization. Multiple formats will be available, letting you shoot up to 1200p photos and 2,400 × 1,800 video.

Relying on both ChatGPT and an internal LLM for queries and live text and voice translation, the glasses also promise things like turn-by-turn directions, music playback and voice calls through dual AAC speakers. Again, that’s abridged version. You can learn more about battery, photo and video quality, and early hands-ons here.

And now that the campaign has surpassed $1 million, all backers will also get a free Charging Case, valued at $99. That said, the lowest funding tier ($479) is already gone, leaving the next cheapest tier at $549, which already comes with the Charging Case in addition to a magnetic Prescription Frame so you can fit in your prescription.

In the meantime, we’ll be following the Rokid Glasses Kickstarter as it makes headway until its October 10th close.

Meta’s smart glasses with display, codenamed ‘Hypernova’, are reportedly slated to cost less than initially expected, with Meta allegedly slashing price expectations from the rumored $1,000 – $1,400 range to $800. Now, respected supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says Meta is nearly ready to begin mass production, although sales expectations aren’t very high.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported last week that Hypernova will be cheaper than initially reported, delivering a pair of smart glasses with a single display and a wrist-worn electromyography (EMG) based controller for input at “about $800,” Gurman says.

Notably, a number of recent leaks provided by data miner ‘Luna’ have also seemingly unveiled the glasses in full, suggesting not only is Hypernova (also referred to as ‘Celeste’) real, but it may be a Meta solo launch—i.e. not a partnership with Ray-Ban and Oakley parent company EssilorLuxottica.

Kuo, known for releasing insider info on Apple products, recently posted on X (machine translated from Traditional Chinese) that Hypernova is expected to enter mass production in Q3 2025.

Ostensibly sourcing supply chain info, Kuo says Hypernova will have a two-year product cycle, with shipments over the next two years estimated to be around 150,000 to 200,000 units in total—significantly less than the over two million Ray-Ban Meta units sold since release in 2023.

“Based on Qualcomm chip shipment forecasts, global smart glasses shipments in 2026 are estimated at about 13 to 15 million units, which shows that Hypernova’s market share is negligible, hence it seems more like Meta’s experimental product,” Kuo maintains.

Continuing:

AI will be the most important selling point of Hypernova, but the exploration of applications integrating AI and AR is still in the early stages, and with a selling price of about $800, this should be the main reason Meta is conservatively viewing Hypernova’s shipment volumes. Additionally, to pursue mass production feasibility, it adopts LCoS, but this also brings hardware design challenges such as appearance design, brightness, response time, and battery life.

Kuo posits that Hypernova holds a few strategic implications for Meta: to preempt Apple’s release and build brand image, accumulate ecosystem experience as early as possible, and understand user behavior.

Truly, the addition of a ‘simple’ display to its smart glasses platform changes things from both a user and platform holder perspective. As with early entrants into the ‘smart glasses with display’ segment, such as Rokid’s recently pitched Glasses, users won’t just be snapping photos and video, taking calls and listening to music, or talking with LLMs.

People will expect display-clad smart glasses to do things smart things like turn-by-turn directions, live text and audio capture real-time translation, and more interaction with apps, given Hypernova is supposed launch with more articulated input beyond simple swipes, button presses, and voice input can provide. Getting that right is no small feat, as Kuo suggests Meta may simply not be ready for the sort of wider adoption Ray-Ban Meta has driven.

Meta sees smart glasses as a stepping stone to all-day AR, likely making hesitancy the right move. The company needs to not only feed all of those learnings into a bigger and better AR platform down the line at some point, but also create something that won’t frustrate the glut of consumers with half-baked experiences or hardware limitations that could tarnish the segment before it even gets off the ground.

After all, Meta is banking on owning a sizeable piece of AR as it hopes to eventually generate a return on its multiple billions of dollars spent per year on Reality Labs, its XR research and product division, so rashly jumping into the coming wave of smart glasses may do more harm than good.

Chinese AR startup Rokid launched a Kickstarter campaign yesterday for Rokid Glasses, a new version of the company’s smart glasses with green monochrome displays which previously launched in China. Now, after 24 hours, the project has already garnered over $500,000, marking an undeniable demand for smart glasses that go beyond the audio-only experience of Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta HSTN glasses.

Starting at the base tier of $479, representing a 20% discount of its $599 MSRP, Rokid Glasses boast a bevy of familiar features, including AI voice queries (via ChatGPT), music listening, calls, and photo and video capture.

Rokid Glasses’ biggest feature though is undoubtedly its integrated dual waveguides, which output a monochrome green heads-up display for things like turn-by-turn directions, teleprompter, and real-time text and voice translation with 89 languages (five offline via Rokid’s own LLM).

Notably, there are a few smart glasses coming to market promising ostensibly similar heads-up displays. Google is promising future availability in its slate of forthcoming Android XR smart glasses. Meta is also rumored to release a display version of its smart glasses, likely also built in partnership with EssilorLuxottica like Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta. Reports also point to Apple developing smart glasses, although rumors haven’t specified whether these also include display(s).

But Rokid is one of the first big names in the XR space looking to serve consumers with its display-clad smart glasses. And the results so far suggest we’re going to see multi-million dollars flood into its Kickstarter campaign, which is slated to continue until October 10th.

Billed as the “world’s lightest full-function AI & AR glasses” (they aren’t actually augmented reality, more on why here), the device is built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR1 and NXP’s RT600 processors, featuring dual micro-LED displays delivering 1500 nits of brightness.

Sporting a single 12MP Sony IMX681 camera sensor, which captures a 109° field of view via its f/2.25 aperture, promising low-light HDR and digital video stabilization.

Through both voice prompts (“Hey Rokid!”) and pressing the right-mounted shutter button, users can shoot photos in multiple formats—3:4 at 1,200p, 9:16 at 900p, and 4:3 at 680p—and video in 3:4 at 1,800 × 2,400, 9:16 at 1,350 × 2,400, and 4:3 at 2,400 × 1,800. Yes, it also has internal and external capture lights, which indicates when a user is recording.

Integrated audio comes via near-ear AAC speakers, also featuring a four mic array that boasts integrated noise reduction for wind noise.

As for battery life, Rokid Glasses feature a 210 mAh internal battery, which the company says will offer 8–10 hours of mixed use, 5–6 hours of music, 2 hours of always-on display, and 45 minutes of “intensive recording.” A 3,000 mAh charging case is available in some tiers, or as a stretch goal provided the campaign reaches $1 million.

What’s more, the 49 gram smart glasses also feature a magnetic clip-on frame design for prescription lenses, which Rokid is supplying in its $519 backer tier.

We haven’t gone hands-on yet, although Tyriel Wood previewed an early unit (seen below) that suggests Rokid Glasses are indeed the real deal. As it is, Rokid is an established name in AR, having delivered multiple devices over the years following its founding in 2014.

Notably, shipping for Rokid Glasses is estimated for November 2025, which could leave some space before year’s end for other creators to announce their own competitors in the space.

Events to watch out for include is a rumored follow-up to Samsung Unpacked (reportedly on September 29th) and Meta Connect (September 17th). Its uncertain when Google and its eyewear partners hope to unveil the first slate of Android XR glasses, coming from Warby Parker, South Korea’s Gentle Monster, and ostensibly Google themselves.

In the meantime, you can learn more about Rokid Glasses over on the Kickstarter campaign, which goes until October 10th.

Brilliant Labs unveiled Halo, its next-gen smart glasses that pack in a full-color micro OLED display, bone conduction speakers, and real-time voice-based AI assistant—priced at a surprisingly reasonable $300.

Weighing in at just over 40 grams, Halo builds on the company’s earlier experiments in heads-up displays, including Monocle, a clip-on developer kit released in 2023, and Frame, a slimmer display unit launched a year later.

Halo represents a more consumer-oriented evolution, combining vision correction support, on-device AI, and open-source hardware in a form factor designed for everyday use.

The glasses are powered by a low-power Alif B1 processor with a Cortex-M55 CPU and a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of performing AI tasks directly on the device.

A big feature is the company’s new integrated AI assistant, Noa, which supports real-time chats, promising to not only see what you see, but remember it too for later. And you’re meant to use it all-day, as the company says battery life is rated for up to 14 hours of typical use.

And as you’d imagine, a pair of microphones are onboard so you can talk with Noa, while a low-power optical sensor and six-axis IMU provide input for gesture and tap recognition. Connectivity is handled via Bluetooth 5.3.

That single optical sensor isn’t for taking POV videos or images and posting them on Instagram though, as it’s used just for “AI inference,” Brilliant Labs says. Notably, there’s no familiar capture LED to indicate when it’s recording, like you see on Ray-Ban Meta or Xiaomi AI Glasses—likely because Halo doesn’t natively make video/images accessible to the user.

Noa is slated to be offered in two tiers: a free ‘Basic’ version with memory support and limited usage, and a ‘Plus’ subscription tier that includes full-speed conversational AI. Pricing for the premium tier has not yet been disclosed.

The display optics can be adjusted between +2 to -6 diopters to accommodate users with various levels of vision correction, and prescription lenses will also be available through partner Smart Buy Glasses.

As with Brilliant Labs’ previous projects, Halo is open source. The company has published its design files and source code on GitHub, inviting developers and hardware enthusiasts to experiment with and modify the platform.

Shipping is slated to begin in Q4 2025, with Brilliant Labs noting that shipping is on a “first come, first served” basis. You can pre-order today direct on the Brilliant Labs website, priced at $299.

Check out the specs below:

Brilliant Labs Halo Specs

• Display: Micro color OLED, adjustable +2 to -6 diopters
• Audio: 2x bone conduction speakers
• Processor: Alif B1 with Cortex-M55 CPU and NPU
• Sensors
  • Low-power optical sensor
  • 2x microphones with audio activity detection
  • 6-axis IMU with tap detection
• Lenses: Optical-grade with anti-reflective coating
• Optional: prescription or sunglass lenses
• Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.3
• Software
  • Open Source software (available on GitHub)
  • ZephyrOS with Lua scripting
  • Cross-platform mobile companion app
  • Cloud-based AI assistant (Noa)
• Battery life: Up to 14 hours
• Fit: Designed for IPD range of 58–72mm
• Weight: Just over 40 grams

Brilliant Labs announced it’s getting ready to launch its next generation of smart glasses at the end of the month, making it the company’s third device since it was founded in 2019.

In 2023, Brilliant Labs released Monocle, a developer kit which included a single heads-up display that was meant to be clipped onto existing eyewear.

A year later, the company released Frame, which evolved Monocle’s monoscopic display and housed it in a glasses-like form factor, including a single camera sensor—making for an impressively slim and light package weighing in at less than 40g.

Frame was “designed to be your AI driven personal assistant,” the company says, emphasizing its access to AI models like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Whisper, so you gets answers to questions about what you’re currently looking at, experience live translation from either speech or text, and search the Internet in real-time.

Now, Brilliant Labs says its next device is coming on July 31st. Information is thin on the ground, however company co-founder and CEO Bobak Tavangar is taking part in a launch day Q&A via the augmented reality subreddit.

There, we also got a side glimpse of the device in question, which appears to have ditched the round, old school spectacle vibe for a more modern frame shape. Whatever the case, we’re sure to learn more come July 31st. We’ll be keeping an eye on the augmented reality subreddit and the company’s website then.

Meanwhile, the smart glasses segment is heating up. Meta and EssilorLuxottica announced its next-gen Oakley Meta HSTN smart glasses last month; shortly afterwards Chinese tech giant Xiaomi announced its was releasing its own AI Glasses. On the horizon is Google’s Android XR-based smart glasses, built in collaboration with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster.

Although Brilliant Labs is currently one of the few actually offering a pair of smart glasses with a built-in display, it won’t be that way for long. Google says it’s going to offer a model of its Android XR smart glasses with some sort of display. Leaks also maintain Meta’s next pair of smart glasses may also include a display and a wrist-worn controller for input.