News

Brilliant Labs Unveils All-day Smart Glasses with Color Display, Pre-orders Launch at $300

August 1, 2025 From roadtovr

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

Meta Avatars Get a Major Makeover With New Body Types, Poses & AI-driven Clothing Styles

July 31, 2025 From roadtovr

Meta is giving its Avatars another big upgrade, offering users finer control over things like face shape, body part sizes, hair, makeup and more.

Avatars are integrated across the gamut of Meta’s platforms, including Horizon Worlds, Home and Workrooms on Quest and mobile, and across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.

Now, users in the US and Canada can choose from dozens of new body types and customizable features, including things like shoulders, hips, and biceps. A new body preview mode is also there, letting users adjust their frame before customizing with outfits.

Notably, the Avatar face editor is also getting a boost, with new parametric controls for customizing things like jawlines, cheek fullness, and facial depth. Additionally, Meta says it’s added 18 standing poses, over 50 new emotes, and dozens of new clothing options tailored to fit all body types.

And to style your avatar, a new AI-powered style tool is launching too, which lets Horizon mobile app users generate new outfit ideas via text prompt or randomization, allowing users to then manually fine tune those creations.

Meta says it’s initially releasing the new avatar system to 13+ users in the US and Canada, noting that it’s rolling out the update gradually, which also means there should be more styles and features added over time.

‘Spotify’ Finally Comes to Quest, Letting You Listen to Music in the Background

July 30, 2025 From roadtovr

Spotify finally has its own Quest web app, letting you listen to music in the background as you go about your virtual ways.

The new Spotify app for Quest isn’t an app in the traditional sense, but rather a progressive web app (PWA) that essentially opens up its own browser window.

While that means you can’t use Spotify offline, like you might on Android or iOS, it does mean you can bypass the old song and dance of having to open the browser and go to Spotify web manually.

It also means you can enjoy all of the same music and podcasts however you like, be it minimized for background play, or maximized so you can watch video podcasts, check out track lyrics, browse artists, and manage your playlists.

And as you’d imagine, the Spotify web app for Quest is free, supporting both free and paid subscriptions. You can find Spotify for Quest over on the Horizon Store, supporting Quest 2 and above.

Meta & Stanford Reveal Ultra-Thin Holographic XR Display the Size of Glasses

July 30, 2025 From roadtovr

Researchers at Meta Reality Labs and Stanford University have unveiled a new holographic display that could deliver virtual and mixed reality experiences in a form factor the size of standard glasses.

In a paper published in Nature Photonics, Stanford electrical engineering professor Gordon Wetzstein and colleagues from Meta and Stanford outline a prototype device that combines ultra-thin custom waveguide holography with AI-driven algorithms to render highly realistic 3D visuals.

Although based on waveguides, the device’s optics aren’t transparent like you might find on HoloLens 2 or Magic Leap One though—the reason why it’s referred to as a mixed reality display and not augmented reality.

At just 3 millimeters thick, its optical stack integrates a custom-designed waveguide and a Spatial Light Modulator (SLM), which modulates light on a pixel-by-pixel basis to create “full-resolution holographic light field rendering” projected to the eye.

Unlike traditional XR headsets that simulate depth using flat stereoscopic images, this system produces true holograms by reconstructing the full light field, resulting in more realistic and naturally viewable 3D visuals.

“Holography offers capabilities we can’t get with any other type of display in a package that is much smaller than anything on the market today,” Wetzstein tells Stanford Report.”

The idea is also to deliver realistic, immersive 3D visuals not only across a wide field-of-view (FOV), but also a wide eyebox—allowing you to move your eye relative to the glasses without losing focus or image quality, or one of the “keys to the realism and immersion of the system,” Wetzstein says.

The reason we haven’t seen digital holographic displays in headsets up until now is due to the “limited space–bandwidth product, or étendue, offered by current spatial light modulators (SLMs),” the team says.

In practice, a small étendue fundamentally limits how large of a field of view and range of possible pupil positions, that is, eyebox, can be achieved simultaneously.

While the field of view is crucial for providing a visually effective and immersive experience, the eyebox size is important to make this technology accessible to a diversity of users, covering a wide range of facial anatomies as well as making the visual experience robust to eye movement and device slippage on the user’s head.

The project is considered the second in an ongoing trilogy. Last year, Wetzstein’s lab introduced the enabling waveguide. This year, they’ve built a functioning prototype. The final stage—a commercial product—may still be years away, but Wetzstein is optimistic.

The team describes it as a “significant step” toward passing what many in the field refer to as a “Visual Turing Test”—essentially the ability to no longer “distinguish between a physical, real thing as seen through the glasses and a digitally created image being projected on the display surface,” Suyeon Choi said, the paper’s lead author.

This follows a recent reveal from researchers at Meta’s Reality Labs featuring ultra-wide field-of-view VR & MR headsets that use novel optics to maintain a compact, goggles-style form factor. In comparison, these include “high-curvature reflective polarizers,” and not waveguides as such.

Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses Revenue Triples, Fueling Meta’s $3.5 Billion Bet on EssilorLuxottica

July 29, 2025 From roadtovr

EssilorLuxottica released its second quarter earnings report, revealing that Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses have tripled in revenue year-over-year.

Released in 2023, Ray-Ban Meta is the companies’ second-gen smart glasses, serving up music, photo/video capture, and Internet searches via Meta AI.

Starting at $300, the smart glasses have done remarkably well for themselves, prompting Meta to not only expand its smart glasses partnership with EssilorLuxottica into 2030, but also reportedly invest $3.5 billion in the French-Italian eyewear conglomerate.

Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, Image courtesy Meta, EssilorLuxottica

Now, EssilorLuxottica says in its recent Q2/H1 2025 earnings that “AI glasses gained further traction in the first half of the year, with Ray-Ban Meta more than tripling in revenue year-over-year.”

Notably, those sales figures don’t appear to include Oakley Meta HTSN, the company’s next generation of smart glasses which launched pre-orders on July 11th, priced at $500 for the debut ‘Limited Edition’ version of the device.

The report doesn’t specify how many units the companies have sold, however in February the company announced it had sold 2 million Ray-Ban smart glasses since release in 2023.

“With a strong first half, including top-line growth and momentum across all regions and businesses, we are keeping pace with our growth targets despite a volatile environment,” said EssilorLuxottica CEO Francesco Milleri and Deputy CEO Paul du Saillant.

The company reports overall revenue grew by 5.5% to €14 billion (~$16.15 billion) in H1 of 2025, which comes in despite a worsening macroeconomic environment.

EssilorLuxottica cites a few obstacles, including “increased volatility in US customs duties following April 2, 2025 announcement of new reciprocal import tariffs,” and recent devaluation of the US dollar relative to other major world currencies.

Brilliant Labs to Launch Next-gen Smart Glasses on July 31st

July 25, 2025 From roadtovr

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.

Sharp Unveils Prototype VR Controller, Combining Haptic Gloves & Standard Buttons

July 22, 2025 From roadtovr

Sharp announced it’s releasing a prototype VR haptic controller in Japan, which aims to reproduce the sense of touch in VR while serving a familiar button layout.

Japan-based Sharp says its VR haptic controllers can let users sense texture thanks to “multi-segmented tactile elements” placed on the device’s fingertips. Various vibration patterns on the surface are meant to convey different textures, such as smooth, rough, etc., the company says.

“Although the haptics are not at a level that reproduces the real thing, by changing the parameters we have been able to achieve a variety of tactile sensations,” Sharp says on the project’s Japan-facing website. “Rather than leaving it in-house until the developers are satisfied with it, we plan to work with our users to improve the quality of the content.”

Sharp says the device, which will arrive in a left and right pair, “does not allow for delicate finger tracking like glove types.” It also lacks force feedback, or any sort of temperature feedback.

The prototype is supposed to also function like a standard controller, including sticks and buttons, the company says. One thing that isn’t clear though is how the gloves will be tracked, which Sharp says could include mounts for “high market share” tracking standards.

Sharp says the device is currently undergoing demonstration experiments, so it’s not clear whether it will eventually be commercialized; we haven’t seen anything beyond renders at this time. The company is aiming to put early iterations of the device in the hands of the paying public though, at least in Japan.

The company recently closed pre-registrations through its Japan-facing website, pricing units at ¥100,000 (~$680). “Please note that development or release may be canceled,” the company warns.

Granted, Sharp has more experience in XR than you might think. As the leading OEM supplier of high-end VR displays, at one time Sharp was the top display supplier for Meta Quest 2. In late 2024, Sharp and Japan’s largest telecom NTT Docomo also launched a pair of AR glasses, called MiRZA.

Meta Researchers Reveal Compact Ultra-wide Field-of-View VR & MR Headsets

July 18, 2025 From roadtovr

Ahead of an upcoming technical conference, researchers from Meat’s Reality Labs Research group published details on their work toward creating ultra-wide field-of-view VR & MR headsets that use novel optics to maintain a compact goggles-style form-factor.

Published in advance of the ACM SIGGRAPH 2025 Emerging Technologies conference, the research article details two headsets, each achieving a horizontal field-of-view of 180 degrees (which is a huge jump over Meta’s existing headsets, like Quest 3, which is around 100 degrees).

The first headset is a pure VR headset which the researchers say uses “high-curvature reflective polarizers” to achieve the wide field of view in a compact form-factor.

The other is an MR headset, which uses the same underlying optics and head-mount but also incorporates four passthrough cameras to provide an ultra-wide passthrough field-of-view to match the headset’s field-of-view. The cameras total 80MP of resolution at 60 FPS.

The researchers compared the field-of-view of their experimental headsets to that of the current Quest 3. In the case of the MR headset, you can clearly see the advantages of the wider field-of-view: the user can easily see someone who is in a chair right next to them, and also has peripheral awareness of a snack in their lap.

Both experimental headsets appear to use something similar to the outside-in ‘Constellation’ tracking system that Meta used on its first consumer headset, the Oculus Rift CV1. We’ve seen Constellation pop up on a number of Reality Labs Research headsets over the years, likely because it’s easier to use for rapid iteration compared to inside-out tracking systems.

The researchers point out that similarly wide field-of-view headsets already exist the consumer market (for instance, those from Pimax), but the field-of-view often comes at the cost of significant bulk.

A Pimax headset, known for its wide field-of-view. | Photo by Road to VR

The Reality Labs researchers claim that these experimental headsets have a “form-factor comparable to current consumer devices.”

“Together, our prototype headsets establish a new state-of-the-art in immersive virtual and mixed reality experiences, pointing to the user benefits of wider FOVs for entertainment and telepresence applications,” the researchers claim.

For those hoping these experimental headsets point to a future Quest headset with an ultra-wide field-of-view… it’s worth noting that Meta does lots of R&D and has shown off many research prototypes over the years featuring technologies that have yet to make it to market.

For instance, back in 2018, Meta (at the time still called Facebook) showed a research prototype headset with varifocal displays. Nearly 7 years later, the company still hasn’t shipped a headset with varifocal technology.

As the company itself will tell you, it all comes down to tradeoffs; Meta CTO Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth explained as recently as late 2024 why he thinks pursuing a wider field-of-view in consumer VR headsets brings too many downsides in terms of price, weight, battery life, etc. But there’s always the chance that this latest research causes him to change his mind.

Pico Reportedly Developing Slim & Light Mixed Reality ‘Goggles’ to Rival Next-Gen Meta Headset

July 18, 2025 From roadtovr

Pico, the XR headset maker owned by TikTok parent ByteDance, is reportedly developing a mixed reality device aimed at rivaling Meta’s next-generation XR headset.

According to a report from The Information, Pico is currently working on a pair of mixed reality “goggles” codenamed ‘Swan’, which are said to be thin and lightweight—reportedly weighing around just 100 grams.

Citing three people with direct knowledge of the project, The Information reports that the device features a hybrid design that offloads processing to a tethered compute puck. This approach allows the glasses portion of the device to be significantly thinner and lighter than current-generation XR headsets like the Quest 3 or Pico 4 Ultra.

Swan is also said to rely primarily on eye and hand tracking for input, moving away from physical controllers. Furthermore, the report notes that Pico is developing “specialized chips for the device that will process data from its sensors to minimize the lag or latency between what a user sees in AR [sic] and their physical movements.”

Swan is said to be conceptually similar to Meta’s reportedly upcoming mixed reality device codenamed ‘Phoenix’, which also includes a compute puck and a glasses-like form factor. According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, Meta’s headset could launch in either 2026 (WSJ’s estimate) or 2027 (as cited by The Information) and may cost under $1,000.

The codename itself is still a matter of speculation: The Information refers to Meta’s headset as ‘Phoenix’, while the WSJ uses ‘Loma’, and online sources have also mentioned ‘Puffin’.

That said, there is currently no information on what Swan will cost or where it will ship. In the past, Pico’s consumer headsets have typically been priced slightly above Meta’s equivalents and have been available primarily in East and Southeast Asia and Europe—but not in North America.

Varjo is Pulling Support for All of Its Older XR Headsets Next Year

July 18, 2025 From roadtovr

Varjo announced that starting next year, it’s no longer supporting its fleet of third generation XR headsets, which includes XR-3, VR-3, and Varjo Aero.

As first spotted by XT Today, Varjo says it’s now “focusing our manufacturing efforts on the XR-4 Series headsets,” which released in late 2023.

The Finland-based company notes in a support FAQ that its companion software, Varjo Base, will receive software updates and bug fixes until the January 1st, 2026 cutoff date.

After its final update, the company says that owners of XR-3, VR-3, and Aero can still use older versions of the software, but this also includes the end of customer support, technical and developer assistance for those devices.

Released in 2021, Varjo’s third-gen headsets marked the company’s departure from solely focusing on enterprise headsets. While both its XR-3 and VR-3 were squarely targeted at businesses with cash to spare—priced at $5,495 and $3,195 respectively—which included an obligatory annual subscription fee, Aero was the company’s first to actively appeal to prosumers.

Released in late 2021, Aero was priced at $2,000, which included subscription-free compatibility with SteamVR via Varjo Base (i.e. you can’t just plug it in like Valve Index, Bigscreen Beyond 2, etc).

Although Aero was by far one of the most expensive prosumer PC VR headsets on offer at the time, it wasn’t for naught. In our deep dive review of Aero, Road to VR’s Ben Lang praised the headset’s “stunning clarity,” noting it was poised to be “a dream headset for VR simmers who aren’t afraid to trade cash for immersion.”

Notably, Varjo has been sold out of all third-gen headsets for at least over a year now, with the company additionally confirming production has been discontinued for these devices.

This leaves the Varjo’s main focus on its XR-4 Series headsets, which were released in late 2023, marking a return to its enterprise-only roots. Its fourth-gen series includes the standard XR‑4 ($5,990), XR‑4 Focal Edition ($9,990), and its military-compliant XR‑4 Secure Edition, which comes in three variants (~$18,00 – $32,000).

While previously launched without subscription-based access to Varjo Base, the company announced in March that some previously free software features would be paywalled behind a ‘Varjo Base Pro’ license, which includes more advanced mixed reality capabilities, expanded tracking support, programmatic controls, and multi-app functionality.

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