XR Industry News

China-based projector manufacturer XGIMI launched a crowdfunding campaign in June for its first smart glasses, MemoMind One, which is banking on consumer interest in display-clad smart glasses that don’t contain cameras. Now the campaign has reached $1 million, giving the segment anther early vote of confidence.

The News

MemoMind One quickly surpassed its lowball fund goal of $80,000 HKD (~$10,000 USD) when the Kickstarter launched on June 28th, going on to secure $500,000 in less than a week after launch. Now the project just topped $1 million with 20 days left in the campaign, which closes on August 28th.

If you haven’t followed its progress, MemoMind One was first shown at CES 2026 in Las Vegas in January, pitching a pair of smart glasses that don’t include any sort of camera, instead sporting dual green micro-LED displays (2,000 nits), integrated audio, and a host of AI-assisted actions, such as real-time translation, note taking, contextual assistance, and navigation.

Notably, MemoMind One is positioning itself as one of the least expensive display smart glasses on the market, with pricing starting at $400 for the Standard Edition of all stylings: Nomad, Gotham and Archive. There is also the option to add prescription lenses ($500) and a Custom Edition with multiple colorways starting at $450, all of which are expected to ship in August 2026.

XGIMI hasn’t released any sort of stretch goals, as it appears the campaign is more oriented toward pre-orders. You can learn more about it on MemoMind One’s Kickstarter here.

My Take

This is a bit of a casual rehash of my original take when MemoMind One reached the $500,000 mark, but I’ll save you click with this (slightly) condensed version.

If MemoMind One’s campaign is any indication, not having an onboard camera is a much stronger marketing position than you might think, partly due to blowback Meta is getting from its own display-less camera smart glasses right now.

Until recently, Meta hasn’t properly kept creepers from drilling out capture LEDs, or otherwise vaunting the system by other means. It’s too early to tell since there are no major competitors yet, but Meta may have ‘poisoned the well’ somewhat.

While MemoMind isn’t the first to claim camera-less display smart glasses as a unique marketing proposition, it is doing it at a cheaper price than the main competition: Even Realities G2, which are priced at $600 before adding prescription lenses.

That said, I’m not certain ‘display only’ smart glasses will ever be truly massive; cameras and displays are difficult to run together in today’s power and compute constraints, so it seems more like a temporary division that’s being fashioned into a marketable segment. I’ll be putting those assumptions to the test when I go in for a long-term hands-on with MemoMind One, so check back soon.

VITURE today launched its latest AR glasses, VITURE Pro 2, which the company calls its thinnest, lightest and comfortable yet. Alongside it, Viture also unveiled a new, more pocketable USB-C dock which lets you connect to a wider range of devices, such as Nintendo Switch 2.

Viture Pro 2 – $300

Like many of the company’s AR glasses, Viture Pro 2 is mostly meant for traditional gaming and computing, albeit on a virtual screen projected in front of you thanks to its see-through AR birdbath optics.

And while it may look similar to the original 2024 Viture Pro from the outside, the company says it’s thinner, lighter, and brighter. Its optical stack has also been re-tuned optical stack, delivering better clarity overall, the company says.

Dubbed ‘UltraClarity 3.0’, the Viture says it’s tightened four key visual factors over its predecessor, including field curvature, image sharpness across the full 50-degree field of view (FOV), geometric distortion across the entire diopter range, and image stability as the pupil moves off-center.

“Sharpness holds not just at the center but into every corner,” the company says. “Horizontal and vertical resolve equally. Straight lines stay straight at any prescription. And the image stays put wherever the eyes wander, instead of swimming as the pupil moves off-axis.”

It’s also impressively thin and light, weighing just 63g, which the company notes is also the thinnest frame the company has ever built, making it 20% lighter and 16% thinner than the original Viture Pro.

Note: what you don’t see in Viture Pro 2’s promo photos is the required USB-C tether, as it’s not a standalone device, requiring you to attach the included cable from the left temple tip of the glasses right behind the ear. Equally important to note is that Viture Pro 2 doesn’t support 6DOF spatial tracking, as it lacks onboard camera sensors, meaning you can’t pin a display to a specific point in space.

Under the hood, or rather sandwiched on top of its birdbath-style AR optics, is a pair of Sony micro-OLED displays delivering the same 1,920 x 1,080 per-eye resolution and 120Hz refresh rate, albeit with a higher perceived brightness of up 1,600 nits over the original’s 1,000 perceived nits.

It also boasts a built-in diopter adjustment with independent dials per-eye, covering 0 to −5.00D, a slightly higher FOV of 50 degrees (originally 46 degrees), and three included nose pads for seven adjustment positions.

You can find Viture Pro 2 available today for $300 across Viture and Amazon.com, which includes a free lens shade in the box for better immersion.

Mobile Dock Mini – $100

As a part of the company’s five-year anniversary, Viture also unveiled a new, smaller mobile dock called Mobile Dock Mini ($100), which is now available for pre-order.

While Viture Pro 2 can already connect to a variety of USB-C devices natively, the modular, pocket-sized dock expands that to more devices —notably Nintendo Switch 2—while doubling as a USB-C hub and extended battery.

In all, it’s essentially a more compact version of the company’s original Viture Pro Mobile Dock ($100), featuring a slight smaller at 10,000 mAh battery than the original’s 13,000 mAh. The new Mobile Dock Mini is however 34% smaller and 30% lighter, making it a more pocketable way to charge a phone, Nintendo Switch 2 while powering any of Viture’s glasses models at the same time.

It works in two different modes: ‘Hug Mode’, which “hugs” the back of a Switch 2 as a single unit via a magnetic mount, and ‘Solo Mode’, which allows it to become a compact standalone USB-C hub.

You can find this and the whole gamut of Viture glasses and accessories over on Viture’s website.

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].”