XR Industry News

Snap announced it’s hosting an event dedicated to Specs, the company’s next-gen AR glasses, on September 16th in Los Angeles, California.

At the event, Snap co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel is said to share “the first in-depth look at SPECS, demonstrating how they bring AI assistance, work tools, entertainment, and shared experiences into the world around us, helping people create, connect, learn, and get things done while staying present,” the company says.

While the company characterizes it as a “launch” event for Specs, the device’s pre-order page maintains it’s still slated to ship sometime this fall across the US, UK and France, suggesting we’ll get a more precise ship date during the event.

Snap launched pre-orders for Specs in June, priced at $2,195. Similar to the company’s fifth-gen Specs released in 2024, the new device don’t require an external compute puck or tethered connection to external devices, as the glasses pack in two Qualcomm Snapdragon processors—one dedicated to computer vision and another for running AR experiences, or “Lenses,” as the company calls them.

In the meantime, you can sign up to watch the Specs event live here, which takes place on September 16th at 4:00 PM PT (local time here). Attendees of the physical event will have an opportunity to be some of the first to go hands-on.

The team behind SideQuest, Quest’s alternative app library, announced it’s bringing Microsoft’s social VR platform AltspaceVR (2015) back from the dead.

The News

Initially released in 2015 and then acquired by 2017 by Microsoft, Altspace was one of the first successful social VR platforms, launching across PC VR headsets, Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Go, and both Quest and Quest 2.

In early 2023 however, Microsoft announced it was shuttering Altspace in a bid to shuttle resources to its cloud-based mixed reality collaboration platform, Microsoft Mesh, which was subsequently deprecated in 2025 and parted out to Microsoft Teams.

Now, SideQuest CEO and founder Shane Harris reveals in a Reddit post the company has acquired the rights to the Altspace name, noting it will be “a brand new Altspace” for a modern audience as well as “a spiritual successor to the Altspace we know and love and capture what made it great.”

Check out Altspace’s final moment below, courtesy ‘Vitua Zone’:

Harris reveals SideQuest will be re-launching Altspace with many of the same features and functionality the app had circa 2016-2017, further noting he’s assembled a team of previous Altspace staffers and “some of the most prolific OG players” to help shape the platform.

One such re-hire is Christian Boe, the original concept designer behind the original robots in Altspace, which were discontinued in favor of human-only avatars, which means the new Altspace will most definitely feature robot avatars of some sort in addition to custom avatars, Harris says.

Harris maintains we’ll hear regular updates and developer insight in the coming weeks and months.

My Take

Altspace likely shut down for a myriad of reasons, although one of the biggest is it never actually monetized; in its eight years of existence the platform never featured an in-world economy or creator marketplace, and its avatar system was decidedly much more ‘off the shelf’ than something like VRChat, which lets you upload, sell, or style your avatar in any way imaginable.

Starting Altspace back up, and importantly employing those people who helped define the platform in the first place, is a giant win, although being able to pick up where they left off and find an economic model that benefits both players and creators alike will be a tall order.

Still, there must be some contingent of VR-using Rec Room refugees out there looking for a platform that isn’t VRChat, and Altspace may try to fill that gap. Whatever the case, getting back to its roots means putting on a lot of events to attract regular users.

For all of the team’s know-how though, relaunching Altspace is roughly like starting from scratch with the new generation of younger players, as even in 2023 Altspace had waned a lot since its heyday in 2016-2017. I’d like to hope they can also attract back a bulk of the OG users too looking for that socially tame sweet spot Altspace seemed to fill so well.

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is set to unveil its first pair of smart glasses at next year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).

The News

Codenamed ‘N50’, Apple’s smart glasses were reportedly meant for a late 2026 reveal, with launch targeting early 2027. Now Gurman maintains that WWDC, which is set to take place in June 2027, won’t be the device’s actual launch day; consumer release is expected sometime by the end of 2027.

The delay is said to essentially be a two-fold issue, centered on both refining the product from an engineering standpoint, but also a marketing challenge of defining the device’s messaging around privacy.

Like Ray-Ban Meta and the company’s cheaper Meta Glasses, which notably don’t feature any EssilorLuxottica branding, Apple’s smart glasses are said to include two camera sensors; one for photo and video capture and the other for computer vision tasks.

“That’s meant developing features and policies that can address the concerns swirling around competing products from Meta Platforms Inc,” Gurman says, noting the teams developing glasses within Apple’s Vision hardware group and elsewhere in the company see privacy as “priority No. 1.”

And similar to Meta’s audio-only smart glasses, Apple’s N50 hardware isn’t expected to include a display of any kind, instead relying on cameras, speakers and microphones for things such as phone calls, AI queries, listening to music, and capturing images.

My Take

Has the well already been poisoned by creeps? Will fashionable smart glasses with more stringent privacy laws be enough to rehabilitate the segment as a whole? Honestly, I think it’s way too early to frame it that way. Despite some impressive sales figures from Meta and EssilorLuxottica, smart glasses are still very much a niche item; most people own several pairs of sunglasses and likely zero smart glasses at this point.

Some of that might come down to its currently being led by Meta, which has a poor track record on privacy and user surveillance. Some of it may be price sensitivity, although Meta’s $300 no-brand glasses should put a dent in that. In the end, I think most people don’t know why they’d even want a pair in the first place, which Apple will probably vaunt since the company’s top-tier phones and accessories typically start out as status symbols anyway.

Personally, I don’t own a part of audio-only smart glasses because I’m a text-based person living in a very not-text-based world. I don’t talk to AI because I can’t stand the long-winded answers. I can easily skip over the tropey, Silicon Valley-flavored social lubrication and get to the meat of the answer by reading and typing for clarification than I can by having a stilted conversation out loud. The cameras are also basically at the level of mid-range smartphone from a couple of years go, although the speed to snap a life moment is decidedly quicker despite being objectively worse quality than basically any new smartphone today.

Despite this, there’s clearly money in it now, and it’s also a relatively easy way for Apple/Google/Samsung/Meta to gain a foothold in the soon-to-come AR glasses segment of the future.

Apple is however hoping to avoid Meta’s missteps, it seems. Notably, Meta landed in hot water following the revelation that in March the company was accused of sending private smart glasses camera footage to a Kenya-based subcontractor for manual review to train its AI models. The company has also been accused of baking in facial recognition into its smart glasses, although that feature hasn’t been activated.

That said, it’s clear even Meta is looking to tighten up their act as bigger competition comes online, as the company has finally closed the hardware loophole that allowed motivated users to physically drill out the capture LED, which notifies others when a user is actively taking photos or video. Now, Meta Glasses users who have in some way deactivated the capture LED (already in addition to simply covering it) are no longer able to record video or take photos.

Samsung and Google are also set to release a fleet of smart glasses this year from Warby Parker and South Korea’s Gentle Monster, the latter of which is making a large concerted push into the North American and European market with its smart glasses at the forefront. And that cadre, along with Apple and Meta (which admittedly released its prosumer Meta Display Glasses) also ostensibly has multiple consumer display models in the works too, although I’d expect the bulk of those to be at the very least a device generation away, maybe even further.

AR unicorn Magic Leap is again pivoting its core business, this time to serve as a waveguide supplier to other companies making AR glasses, something that we’ve learned comes amid a mass lay off nearly 200 of its core engineering and product development staff.

According to a formal WARN Act notification letter to US government officials last week, the company is set to lay off 193 employees at the company’s Plantation, Florida headquarters.

A wide range of product development and engineering roles are set to be affected come October 1st, the letter reveals, including software, hardware, UX/design, product management, manufacturing engineering, quality, technical program management, and several senior engineering and executive leadership positions.

Although it’s uncertain how many will remain at Magic Leap—estimates point to a few hundred at this point—the mass layoff comes amid a broader shift at Magic Leap, as the company announced earlier this month its was undergoing a “strategic pivot to accelerate the development of AI display glasses.”

The company says it’s now shifting from building first-party AR headsets to taking on the role of “essential AR ecosystems partner, waveguide supplier, and device integration expert for the technology industry.”

“Magic Leap is seizing the moment where our AR innovation and manufacturing expertise create the greatest market impact,” said Scott Carden, SVP of display engineering and manufacturing at Magic Leap. “We’re solving the toughest challenges of scaling waveguide production, from industry-leading waveguide performance to manufacturing and full-device integration. Now, we’re using our unmatched expertise to help partners bring AI display glasses to millions of consumers in the fastest way possible through our waveguide technology.”

Founded in 2010 by Rony Abovitz, Magic Leap is arguably the most well-funded AR startups to date, having massed well over $4 billion in funding from investors including Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, a majority holder at over $1 billion invested, as well as Google, Alibaba, and Qualcomm.

Despite an enviable runway, the company’s first AR headset didn’t exactly live up to the hype. Released in 2018, Magic Leap 1 awkwardly straddled the consumer and enterprise segment at the (then unthinkable) price of $2,300, essentially forcing the company to pivot and drop its consumer ambitions a short two years later. That first pivot away from consumer also marked the departure of CEO and co-founder Rony Abovitz, with its follow-up device Magic Leap 2 released in late 2020 solely targeted at enterprise.

And while Magic Leap has only just announced its waveguide optics pivot, in reality the company was making moves away from first-party devices as early as July 2024, according to a Bloomberg report, which characterized the action as a last ditch effort to make use of the company’s AR optics tech.

Meanwhile, we’ve heard substantially nothing about development of first-party devices, as over the past two years the company has only announced a hardware partnership with Google and manufacturing partnership with Taiwan’s Pegatron, both of which center around licensing and manufacturing waveguides.

Palmer Luckey, the founder of military tech startup Anduril (also the founder of Oculus), quietly teased a pair of unannounced AR glasses that are presumably in development at Anduril. Despite their incredibly compact appearance, Luckey says they are not merely smart glasses, but are indeed built for full AR capability.

Just days after Snap Inc revealed its latest Specs standalone AR glasses, a photo shared on X showed Anduril founder Palmer Luckey wearing what appeared to be some kind of clip-on attachment to his sunglasses. The caption of the photo, shared by Lulu Cheng Meservey, included the quote “Other AR glasses getting literally frame mogged.” This ostensibly referred to Snap’s Specs glasses, which drew significant commentary about whether their design was too bulky to be socially acceptable.

Regardless of where one stands on the size of Specs, the glasses shown in the photo of Luckey appear incredibly compact by comparison. This prompted Road to VR founder Ben Lang to question whether it was actually a fair comparison to make; Lang pointed out that surprisingly compact smart glasses—like the Even Realities G2—are already available on the market today, but they remain compact because they lack the full hardware stack required for true AR glasses.

Luckey responded directly to Lang’s scepticism, saying “[…] these are the real deal! No shortcuts, just really good tech in conjunction with deeply invested partners like Qualcomm, Meta Quest, and [Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, CTO at Meta].”

When asked by Lang if the device pictured is capable of true AR, Luckey added, “correct, [the glasses have] wide-FOV full-color stereo.”

Luckey’s confirmation that the device is capable of proper AR is indeed surprising considering the size. Significant questions, however, remain. Chief among them is whether the device is fully standalone or if it relies on a tethered puck (which would serve to offload battery and/or compute), allowing the device to be much smaller than a pair of standalone AR glasses like Specs.

Given the incredibly compact size of the glasses, a tethered architecture seems like the only possible explanation. However, neither the original photo published by Meservey, nor a follow-up photo published by Luckey, show any clear signs of a tether:

Another major question is whether the device is made as a modular add-on to existing off the shelf glasses. The design of the hardware suggests this as a significant possibility (indeed, the glasses pictured look like a regular pair of Ray-Ban Aviators). But making a simple modular add-on to existing glasses introduces significant complexities for the calibration of optics, displays, and tracking hardware.

Far more is unknown about this device than is known at this stage. But there’s reason to believe it’s legitimate, and possibly connected to Anduril’s EagleEye project, which aims to build an augmented reality helmet to bring superhuman perception to soldiers on the battlefield. In 2025, Anduril announced it had partnered with Meta on XR technology for the military, which aligns with Luckey’s statement that the pictured glasses were thanks, in part, to “deeply invested partners [like Meta].”

Meta is rolling out an update to its line of smart glasses that will disable the camera if the device’s capture LED has been tampered with or destroyed.

Since the rollout of Meta’s second-gen Ray-Ban Glasses in 2024, physically covering the white capture LED on any of the company’s current smart glasses shuts off the onboard camera, something the company did to curb casual misuse.

Before Meta’s mandatory v26 update—which is rolling out now to all Meta Ray-Ban, Meta Oakley and its new $300 Meta Glasses—some users got around the software check by simply drilling out the capture LED hardware itself. Granted, that was already against Meta’s terms of service, which state:

“You may not tamper with the Glasses or otherwise obscure or modify any of the features on the Glasses that signal to others that the Glasses are recording.”

Still, that wasn’t much of a deterrent, since the hardware check failed to notice when the capture LED was physically disabled, and not just covered up by a piece of tape.

Speaking to The Verge, Meta VP of Wearables Alex Himel says the privacy-focused update was meant to follow the release of the company’s cheaper Meta Glasses, which notably lack Ray-Ban or Oakley styling. At the time, Himel told The Verge Meta was aware of increasing misuse amid growing adoption.

Meta doesn’t seem to be outright bricking glasses with drilled-out capture LEDs, however not having the camera severely limits what people can do with them, since they don’t include any sort of display, which ought to be deterrent enough for now.

Lacking a display has essentially forced Meta to invest in use cases beyond the comparatively straight forward expectation of taking photos and video, as the company has released updates that bring camera features such as continuous Live AI capture, which lets Meta AI see what you’re seeing so it can help out with tasks or otherwise identify things directly in your filed-of-view.

And while Meta appears to be distancing itself from one of the least savory consumer segments by putting an end to surreptitious public recording, it’s also seemingly frontrunning increased legislation in a growing number of US states and cities, such as New York state and Philadelphia. Public court houses there have recently banned smart glasses of any type, even those with prescription lenses.

Scrutiny around privacy seems to be coming from all sides though, as a recent Wired report maintains Meta has essentially baked in facial recognition to its smart glasses, which is notably still unreleased at this time.

In March, it was revealed Meta was facing a class action lawsuit in the US over privacy concerns tied to its smart glasses, as the company is accused of sending private camera footage to a Kenya-based subcontractor for manual review to train its AI models.

HTC has been attempting a second act as an XR and AI hardware company for a few years now with mixed results. And while the once-dominant smartphone company is still the midst of a protracted revenue decline, HTC seems to have stabilized.

As reported by Taiwan’s Financial Express News, HTC revealed at its annual shareholders meeting a consolidated revenue of NT$292 million (~$10 million) for June 2026, showing a year-over-year decrease of 8.5% and first-half revenue decrease of 9.7% year-over-year.

Although that doesn’t sound particularly encouraging, the decline actually represents a rare degree of stability for the Taiwan-based company, which has battled significant revenue losses since as far back as 2013.

Granted, HTC is now a fraction of its previous size, which was before selling a significant portion of its smartphone engineering team and IP to Google in 2018, and a number of XR hardware talent to Google in 2025.

Still, HTC appears to be settling in at a much lower revenue base, as the company is ostensibly pinning its hopes on AI, smart glasses, its VIVERSE metaverse platform, and its usual smattering of enterprise hardware and services.

Notably, HTC Chairman Cher Wang stated at the company’s recent shareholders’ meeting that AI has become one of the most important trends it’s following, with the company’s first AI-powered smart glasses, the VIVE Eagle, expected to arrive in the US and Europe sometime in Q3 2026.

Wang also highlighted the company’s metaverse platform, VIVERSE, which has transformed into a user-generative platform since last year, having attracted over 1.7 million month active users in May, with more than 32,000 pieces of content and at least 14,000 creators joining.

However, HTC’s main challenge remains converting these user numbers and strategic initiatives into meaningful revenue growth, something the company hasn’t clearly demonstrated since making the pivot from smartphones to XR.

Outside of XR, HTC telecom subsidiary G REIGNS also made progress in industrial applications, as its partners Taiyang Technology and Alaska-based Microcom are working on an end-to-end open radio access network (RAN) solution, which is currently aiming at the US market and remote areas. G REIGNS is also introducing AI, 5G private networks, and edge computing technologies to Taiwan’s deep-sea fishing industry, which launched a smart fish-finding solution to help fisheries improve fish search efficiency and real-time decision-making capabilities.

One area not discussed was HTC’s XR headset strategy, which seems to have stalled somewhat following the 2024 release of its VIVE Focus Vision standalone in September 2024. As the successor to VIVE Focus 3, the $1,150 Focus Vision was primarily aimed at enterprise XR and enthusiasts.

That said, HTC has managed to survive the collapse of its smartphone business while staying afloat in XR amid Meta’s domination of the segment, which is no small feat. Still, its next big test will be to see whether it can efficiently build off these revenue streams in the coming years, and maybe, just maybe reclaim some of its former glory.

Dubai-based smart contact lenses startup XPANCEO announced it’s expanding a partnership with China’s JBD to co-develop a new micro-display designed specifically for smart contact lenses.

Previously, the companies co-developed a printed circuit board with integrated micro-display, as well as a unique optical system capable of forming a near-eye image for easy focus.

Now XPANCEO is deepening ties with JBD, the Shanghai-based micro display company, to co-develop the tiny displays that could one day be in consumer smart contacts of the future.

Notably, JBD is behind some positively miniscule XR displays; one such display we saw back at CES 2020 was smaller than a penny, but capable of a blinding 3,000,000 nits.

The companies say the partnership will focus on scalability and manufacturability, which could lead to their first mass-market production run of specialized contact lens microdisplays. That said, the pieces are still coming together.

Packing everything into a contact lens form factor is a major feat, with XPANCEO noting it should be around the thickness of a human hair to ensure optimal comfort and wearability.

Another critical challenge is brightness management, since light levels must be carefully balanced to ensure ocular safety while remaining strong enough to see clearly and comfortably. Since images are projected directly onto the user’s retina, prospective smart lenses can make use of lower brightness than smart of AR glasses, the companies say.

In May, XPANCEO revealed it struck a similar partnership with France-based solid-state battery startup ITEN, which aims to solve another big challenge in ocular wearables; conventional batteries are thick, not durable enough, and aren’t suitable to be used in in devices worn directly on the human eye.

And while XPANCEO has its work cut out for it, the company seems to be in the best possible position, as the company secured its Series A financing round in July 2025 to the tune of $250 million, garnering it a $1.35 billion valuation.

Even Realities, the China-based smart glasses company, has officially secured unicorn status with its most recent Pre-B financing round, bringing the company $150 million and a $1 billion valuation.

The round, which was led by Meituan and Tencent, is said to be primarily directed toward the development of Even Realities’ next-gen smart glasses platform, the deepening of AI integration, and the scaling of global operations.

The latest round brings the company’s overall funding to $159 million; its initial $9 million Series A round included investment by CDH Investments, Cyanhill Capital, and China Growth Capital among others.

Unlike Meta’s slate of camera-clad smart glasses, Even Realities builds frames that incorporate binocular, monochrome green displays, critically omitting any sort of camera. And its flagship smart glasses, Even G2, is one of the leaders in the quickly growing ‘display glasses’ segment, incorporating user input through its health-tracking Even R1 smart ring.

“Every generation of computing has brought information closer to people, from the desktop to the laptop, from the laptop to the smartphone,” said Will Wang, founder and CEO of Even Realities. “We believe smart glasses are the next step in that progression. The future isn’t about pulling out a device every time you need information. It’s about having the right information available exactly when you need it, while remaining fully present in the world around you. This investment has shown us that our investors share the same belief that good technology should extend life, not interrupt it. We will continue building toward that future.”

The financing comes as smart glasses enter a new phase of growth, with companies such as Google, Meta, Apple, and Samsung investing heavily in the consumer segment.

Even Realties says its new funding will support continued investment in hardware and software development, deepen AI integrations, and expand global operations to meet growing demand. The company says it also plans to accelerate product innovation as it continues building “a new generation of smart glasses designed to make information more accessible in everyday life.”

Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface (BCI) startup Neuralink announced the company has successfully performed its first transdural brain implant surgery, which promises to increase scalability while significantly reducing surgical trauma.

The News

In a new video (seen below), Neuralink reveals it has implanted electrode threads through the dura—the brain’s thick, leather-like membrane that sits just below the skull—without cutting or removing it like in the company’s previous human clinical trials.

The procedure was carried out in May 2026 during a clinical trial at University Health Network’s Toronto Western Hospital, which is intended to make implantation safer, less invasive, and faster, the company says.

To do this, Neuralink redesigned its insertion needle to better penetrate the dura, which can be over 10 times thicker than the company’s electrode threads, which are thinner than a human hair. The key issue though is the brain beneath is constantly moving, and the dura obscures a dangerous network of blood vessels that need to be avoided.

Neuralink also developed synthetic dura models for extensive testing, allowing researchers to test new imaging systems to better view the brain below the dura.

As seen in the video, Neuralink’s new technique uses indocyanine green (ICG) video angiography, an imaging technique that uses a fluorescent dye to visualize blood flow in real-time, and optical coherence tomography (OCT), which can precisely measure the distance to the brain’s surface as it throbs and moves beneath the dura.

Neuralink says eliminating the step of removing the dura simplifies the procedure and is an important step toward more automated, scalable brain implant surgeries.

“We like to say ‘the best step is no step’ and deleting the durectomy takes one of the most delicate manual steps out of the procedure,” the company says. “This potentially means a safer, more repeatable surgery, and a real path to scaling Neuralink to the many people who could benefit.”

The result: the participant was controlling a cursor with their thoughts within an hour of surgery, and recovery is progressing as expected, the company says.

My Take

Neuralink’s latest breakthrough comes in stark contrast to Meta’s recent Brain2Qwerty v2 research. In short, Meta thinks implants are difficult to scale, which is why they’re investigating the limits of what non-invasive imaging methods can achieve when combined with AI-assisted signal decoding.

For now, both Meta and Neuralink are currently hoping to help people with neurological injuries, which impair speech or movement to some extent, although I can’t help but wonder at how both companies are really talking about scaling. At this stage, they’re most definitely talking about scaling to other similarly affected people, although the real target seems fairly implicit : BCI will eventually be a consumer product, and companies need to do the heavy research now to reserve a spot at the table.

Granted, it’s still very early days. Invasive methods, like those used by Neuralink, provide a much higher signal-to-noise ratio when recording and decoding action potentials, although they still require a surgeon to saw out a quart-sized hole in your skull and put needles in your brain. For consumers at least, it’s the sort of elective surgery that will need to approach LASIK levels of safety and precision before it comes anywhere near a ‘neurotypical’ brain. Actually, probably even more than LASIK, as it would need to be sufficiently reversible and potentially upgradable too.

On the flipside, non-invasive methods like Brain2Qwert v2 make use of magnetoencephalography (MEG) imaging equipment strapped to your head, and rely more heavily on AI to decode signals from the respectively higher noise, since it has to infer action potentials from outside the skull. Meta says it can obtain better results than the more common electroencephalography (EEG) methods of imaging, although current MEG devices need to be used in a magnetically-shielded room to work.

I will continue to be impressed with the technical progress on both ends of the BCI spectrum, although I think it’s safe to say most people won’t have to worry about renting a piece of their brains to trillion-dollar market cap company for a little while longer.