XR Industry News

Sightful, the hardware startup working to carve out a new ‘headless AR laptop’ niche, has cancelled plans for its $1,900 Spacetop G1.

Unveiled back in May, Spacetop G1 was set to be the company’s first commercially available product following the early access release of its first Spacetop, which delivered a somewhat bulgy laptop form factor tethered to a pair of XREAL AR glasses.

Now, the company tells CNET it’s cancelling Spacetop G1 altogether, and that pre-order customers will be are offered refunds for their $100 deposits.

Sightful says this comes down to difficulties competing with Microsoft’s own neural processing units (NPU), which are integrated into its latest generation of Surface laptops, as well as the usual cadre of partner OEMs, such as Lenovo, Dell, Asus, and HP. Those NPU-integrated laptops promise to improve processing power and battery efficiency when running AR applications.

Previously targeting an October 2024 launch, Spacetop G1 was set to use its own Android-based SpaceOS, running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon QCS8550 chipset, and exclusively tethered to the supplied XREAL Air 2 Ultra glasses.

Sightful, which secured $61 million in funding to date, now says its shifting focus to a software product for Windows laptops, enabling a similar AR experience, which will run Windows apps and integrate with Microsoft’s CoPilot AI features.

The company says its software will be available in early 2025, initially compatible with Xreal AR glasses via USB-C. More AR glasses could be added, however Sightful hasn’t shared any specific plans.

Furthermore, Sightful says Mac support will arrive post-launch, and there may also be the potential to expand beyond laptops, such as TVs and phones, however it hasn’t provided any specific timeline yet.

Samsung and Google announced in early 2023 that, along with Qualcomm, they’d be releasing an “XR platform” based on Android, which could also see the release of a high-end mixed reality headset. While we still haven’t heard exactly what that XR partnership will entail, a new report from The Information maintains Samsung and Google are also working on smartglasses positioned to potentially compete with Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses.

The report, citing insider sources, alleges Google staffers pitched the idea earlier this year of creating smartglasses with Samsung, which would ostensibly manufacture and market the device to include Google’s own AI efforts.

It was said Google created several smartglasses prototypes in a bid to interest manufacturing partners, such as Samsung.

One such prototype, which The Information reports is code-named ‘Betty’, had a monocular display—conceptually similar to the now discontinued Google Glass. Two other prototypes, code-named ‘Barry’ and ‘Mary’, were said to include stereo displays.

Notably, Meta’s Ray-Ban smartglasses don’t include any displays, relying primarily on voice commands and touch input for things like listening to music, taking video and photos with its on-board cameras, and doing casual AI web searches.

The forthcoming smartglasses collab is allegedly the result of meetings with Samsung executives early this year, Googlers such as Juston Payne, director of product management, and Shahram Izadi, vice president of AR.

There, it was emphasized that comparatively lighter smartglasses were more feasible than pushing for full AR glasses, such as Meta’s Orion AR prototype unveiled at Connect 2024 this past month.

In short, smartglasses with a display could provide the user basic content, such as text and directions, in a relatively small field of view. Full AR glasses would provide a more immersive, large field of view with content such as 3D objects and 2D windows that are anchored inside your real-world environment. Learn more about the difference between AR and smartglasses in our primer.

Whatever the case, we’re sure to learn more soon, as Samsung/Google/Qualcomm confirmed at Samsung Unpacked in July their Android XR platform will be revealed by the end of 2024, which may include launch details surrounding forthcoming XR hardware.

Meta’s biggest reveal at last week’s Connect conference was definitely the Orion prototype AR glasses, which the company says it’s been working on for nearly five years. It’s a big deal not only because of how compact it is, but because Meta says it wants to eventually turn the prototype into a consumer product.

You may have caught our high-level coverage of the Orion headset here, but our friend Norman Chan from Tested got to sit down with Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth to try out the glasses and learn about the Orion project. In typical form, he digs deep into the intriguing technical details of the headset. You can check out his full video below, or scroll further down to get a summary of the technical details Chan learned from his demo and conversation:

Although Orion isn’t ready for mass production, Meta says it’s planning to build around 1,000 units for internal testing. At a purported cost of $10,000 for each prototype, that’s a cool $10 million worth of hardware the company will be shelling out to get enough devices that it can do testing and development at a reasonable scale.

The Orion glasses weigh just 98 grams, which is right under the 100 grams threshold that Meta believes is important for making something that actually looks and feels like glasses rather than goggles. For comparison, the classic Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses weigh around 30 grams, and Meta’s own Ray-Ban smartglasses weigh around 50 grams. So the Orion AR glasses might be reasonably called glasses, but they’re still chunky bois.

Still, 100 grams is incredibly lightweight if you consider that Orion is packing most of the same fundamental capabilities as Meta’s own Quest 3 headset, which is more than five times heavier at 515 grams.

In addition to the novel silicon carbide lenses we heard about, which help the glasses reach a large (for their size) 70° diagonal field-of-view, Orion also employs MicroLED projectors which are not only tiny, but super bright. Meta says they can output hundreds of thousands of nits of brightness. It’s essential to start with such a bright light source because it’s a complex optical path that loses lots of light along the way. By the time it reaches your eyes, you’ll be seeing just 300–400 nits.

That’s a bit brighter than your average VR headset, but still a long way from bright enough to use outside on a bright day. You’d need around 3,000 nits for reasonable outdoor usability. That means Meta will need to find a brighter light source, or reduce inefficiency in the optical path, if it wants Orion to be something people will wear outside of their homes.

As for resolution, Chan says the main Orion demo has a resolution of 13 pixels-per-degree, which is a bit of a surprise. Because AR glasses often have a smaller field-of-view than their VR counterparts, usually they get an advantage on PPD because the available pixels are spread over a smaller area. But even with a 70° field-of-view, Orion has only about half of the PPD of Quest 3 (25PPD).

However, Meta was apparently also demoing a similar Orion prototype that was 26 PPD, but that came at the cost of image brightness. The company told Chan that its goal is to reach a resolution of 30 PPD by the time Orion becomes a proper product. That’s still far from a ‘retina’ resolution of 60 PPD, but should be enough to make the headset useful for text-based work.

One of the most interesting details from Chan’s interview was the way Orion glasses implement eye-tracking.

Like other headsets, the technique involves illuminating the eye with a series of infrared LEDs, then point a camera at the eye to reverse-engineer the position of the eye based on the visible reflection of the IR LEDs. Usually the IR LEDs are placed in a ring around the lens, but Chan noted that Orion places absolutely tiny LEDs directly in the user’s field-of-view—right on the lens.

In order to make it all invisible to the wearer, the wires that power the LEDs are arranged in a nearly randomized pattern that you could easily mistake as a bit of hair on the lens.

A random pattern is less eye-catching than a clearly defined pattern (the basis of many optical illusions). Between the random pattern, minuscule thinness of the wires, and nearness to the eye, Chan said it was all but invisible when looking through the lens.

It was also mentioned that the ‘compute puck’, which offloads much of the processing work from the glasses, uses a custom Wi-Fi 6 protocol to communicate, with a range of 10 or so feet.

The custom protocol purportedly focuses on ‘pulsing’ data from the puck (rather than continuously streaming it) to reduce both heat production and power consumption. We can imagine this being a packet-like approach where instead of communicating constantly from the puck to the glasses, outgoing information is gathered over the course of a discrete time period before being packaged and transmitted.

While the puck is plenty large and is said to be capable of “all day” battery life, the glasses themselves can currently run for up to three hours—essentially the same battery life you’d expect from a standalone VR headset.

Compared to research prototypes shown by Meta in the past, Orion isn’t just made to give people a look at the experience the company wants to eventually deliver. Orion is more of a preview of a product that Meta is actively building.

The company says it still plans to make the glasses smaller, higher resolution, and affordable. And so far Meta says it expects the eventual consumer version of Orion should become available before 2030 and cost somewhere around $1,500.

There’s even more details packed into Chan’s video than we covered here! If you want to hear it all, check out the full video.

Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, Meta CTO and Reality Labs chief, has publicly apologized to Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus who was ousted from the company in 2017 for political reasons.

To this day, Meta (ex-Facebook) never publicly confirmed why Luckey was fired, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg even going on record in a U.S. congressional hearing in 2018, saying Luckey’s ousting “was not because of a political view.”

It was however a political action that ostensibly gained Luckey notoriety among company leadership that led to his ousting in March 2017, only three years after Meta acquired Oculus for $2 billion.

“I got fired for no reason. I gave $10,000 to a pro-Trump group, and I think that’s something to do with it,” Luckey said in a 2018 Wall Street Journal interview, referencing his 2016 donation to an anti-Hillary Clinton ad campaign called ‘Nimble America’.

This has understandably left some bad blood between Luckey and Meta at large over the years, with Luckey exiting the consumer XR space entirely with the founding of his own defense technology company, Anduril Industries.

Carmack’s Regret, Boz & Luckey Showdown

Former Oculus CTO John Carmack, who left the company in 2022, reignited the smoldering flame this April in post on X, saying he regretted “not doing more to support and defend Palmer Luckey at Facebook.” According to Carmack, if former Oculus founders had united, things may have panned out differently.

“Unfortunately, FB encouraged “bring your whole self to work”, which meant politics was openly present, and rabble rousing was a thing,” Carmack said in a follow-up post. “I would guess that an employee referendum would have gone against Palmer, but it might have been different if there was a unified front of Oculus founders behind him.”

Additionally, Carmack said he believed Luckey’s firing was due to “hysterical internal employee pressure,” noting further he “[didn’t] think Mark Zuckerberg had a strong personal view on it.”

As a programming luminary and one of the clearest windows into Meta’s internal workings during his time there, when Carmack speaks, it tends to carry a lot of weight, which prompted current Bosworth to enter the conversational fray.

Responding to Carmack, Bosworth called him “woefully incorrect” on his speculation of an employee referendum to oust Luckey, further stating “I am not in a position to correct [,] except to say maybe don’t speculate!”

Then, when Boz claimed he actually defended Luckey before his ousting, it didn’t sit right with aggrieved party. Here’s Luckey’s response:

“Great story to tell now that I have dragged myself back to relevance, but you aren’t credible. You retweeted posts claiming I donated to white supremacists, and a post saying that anyone who supports Trump because they don’t like Hillary Clinton is a shitty human being. You publicly told everyone my departure had nothing to do with politics, which is absolutely insane and obviously contradicted by reams of internal communications. It is like saying the sky is green. Same goes for you telling people that I wasn’t pressured into saying anything untrue, that any mention of politics and who I was voting for was up to me. Can I post my original statement, the one that was explicitly rejected on account of saying negative things about Hillary Clinton, or is that still considered Work Product? Maybe you are lying, maybe you are just ignorant and willing to launder the lies of others about something you weren’t even around for, but don’t try to play the apolitical hero here.”

If you want to see two multi-millionaires who aren’t running for political office argue with each other, don’t miss the rest of the thread.

Boz Brokers Peace

Nearly five months since the online rift, Luckey was actually invited back to the Meta mothership for the first time since his departure in 2017, where he got a chance to not only try out the company’s Orion AR glasses prototype, but also received a face-to-face apology from Bosworth, which the Meta CTO echoed in a recent post on X.

“I’m glad you came by to check out Orion. I mentioned this in person, but I also wanted to publicly apologize for my previous comments about your time at (then) Oculus. I’m sorry,” Bosworth said. “After reading the recent Tablet piece I dug into some of the events that preceded my time when a different set of people who are no longer at the company were running the group. It turns out I was misinformed but that’s no excuse and since I wasn’t involved I should never have said anything. I’m grateful for the impact you made at the company and in developing VR overall. Looking forward to showing you more of our work in the future.”

“Thanks, Boz. Apology accepted,” Luckey responded. “I am infamously good at holding grudges, but Meta has changed a lot over the past 8 years. The people responsible for my ouster and internal/external smear campaign aren’t even around anymore. At some point, the Ship of Theseus has sailed.”

Luckey further stated it was “pretty surreal to be back on campus with you guys, Orion alone was well worth the trip. It is more or less exactly what I would have wanted to accomplish.”

The Tablet exposé referenced by Boz even had kind words directly from Zuckerberg, which Luckey highlights in an X post as not coming from the usual “PR flunkey”:

“I have a huge amount of respect for Palmer—both for what he’s done for VR and for now achieving the rare feat of building multiple successful companies,” Zuckerberg told Tablet in a statement this month, his first regarding Luckey in several years. “He’s an impressive free-thinker and fun to work with. I was sad when his time at Meta came to an end, but the silver lining is that his work at Anduril is going to be extremely important for our national security. I’m glad an entrepreneur of his caliber is working on these problems. I hope we can find ways to work together in the future.”

The Immersed IRL event, held yesterday in Austin, Texas was the company’s big moment to showcase its upcoming headset and build confidence that it was on track to deliver on the promise of an ambitious headset. But a botched demo may have done the opposite.

Guest Article by Eric Liga

Eric Liga is Chief Scientist at Net Edge VR, a Houston-based company specializing in the creation of VR training software. He has run the Houston VR Meetup for the past ten years, and was programming director for the Immersive Technology Conference, one of the first conferences to focus on uses of AR and VR in business and industry. He has given presentations about VR at NASA, the Translational Research Institute for Space Health, the Houston Global Health Collaborative Conference, and many other industry events.

Immersed IRL drew attendees from around the world. I stood in line with a pre-order customer from Japan, another who had driven in from Canada, a journalist from England, and others from a dozen different US states, all eagerly waiting to try the company’s upcoming Visor headset. The long wait would end in frustration and disappointment for most of them, tempered somewhat by a widely-expressed hope that Immersed might yet deliver on its promises in the end.

Visor is an ambitious, productivity-focused headset designed by Immersed, a small, formerly software-only company, in conjunction with an array of industry partners. It is intended for a largely unmet use case: doing ‘desktop productivity’ work to make use of the unlimited canvas afforded by VR, but with a lightweight, comfortable, socially acceptable, high-resolution headset.

While the Apple Vision Pro is largely intended for productivity (with Apple even coining the term “spatial computing” to emphasize its productivity and ‘computing’ focus), it missed the mark on a number of fronts. Its high weight and front-heavy balance make extended wear uncomfortable. Its size, shape, and uncanny-valley eye simulation on the front of the headset make many users hesitant to wear it in public or in social settings. Add to that its eye-watering price-point of $3,500—and the fact that only users of Apple laptops and desktops get the full productivity benefits—and it’s easy to understand why there’s interest in bringing a competitor to the market that chooses some different trade-offs.

The Visor’s final hardware design, revealed on stage by Immersed founder Renji Bijoy, weighs roughly 185 grams (less than a third of the Apple Vision Pro’s weight), in a thin form factor.

From the front, it does a credible job of looking like a slightly oversized pair of sunglasses. The illusion is less successful from the side due to the width of the optics, but it’s at least in the ballpark of something a user could wear while working at a coffee shop without drawing too much attention. Its screens boast a slightly higher resolution than the Apple Vision Pro, and are intended to allow it to simulate up to five large 4k monitors in a virtual or mixed-reality workspace. It eschews handheld controllers for eye-tracking and hand tracking, for any interactions not handled by a mouse or keyboard.

The tethered battery (which also houses the headset’s wi-fi and Bluetooth hardware) can be set on the desk while working, dropped in a pocket when collaborating on a virtual whiteboard, or excluded completely when connected to a PC. The fact that the radio-emitting components are housed in the optional battery pack means the headset (with some other minor adjustments) could be viable for use in high-security military and government facilities—a potentially lucrative market.

The headset is priced at $400 (but will rise to $500 after October 1st) is subsidized by a required one or two year subscription to Immersed’s software ($40/mo for 2 years, or $60/mo for 1 year). This means that the total cost is a good deal higher than it appears, but makes the up-front cost more palatable. When the subscription is included, a total cost of between $1,120 and $1,460 places it at over double the price of a Quest 3, but less than half of the price of an Apple Vision Pro.

While the Visor is usually shown with over-the-ear stems, like a pair of sunglasses, it will also ship with a head strap designed to better balance its weight and improve comfort. Bijoy was candid about the fact that the stems are there to make non-VR users more comfortable with the idea of wearing a headset. He fully expects users to switch to the strap for extended, every-day use, and said future versions might not include the over-the-ear stems at all.

The prospect of a high-end productivity headset at a reasonable price being produced by a small software company raised an understandable mix of excitement and skepticism from the VR community. The Immersed IRL event was intended, in large part, to demonstrate that the company can deliver on its ambitious promises. But it may well have done the opposite.

At the end of the keynote, Bijoy said that the headsets were being updated to a new firmware, and that the start of promised demos might be slightly delayed. I headed to the demo line, scheduled to be part of the first demo group at 11am. At 11:30, a harried-looking group of Immersed employees pressed quickly through the crowd with headsets cushioned in styrofoam and disappeared behind the black curtain screening off the demo area.

For the next couple of hours, we waited patiently, getting occasional hints from event workers that setup was still in progress, and that demos should start soon. Eventually, a voice over the intercom announced that demos were starting, but that software issues meant that they would be “hardware only” demos.

What that ended up meaning was that we could look at and handle the headsets, and we could even put them on our heads to feel the comfort and weight. But that none of the headsets would actually be powered-on. I asked if we could at least power them up to see the quality of the displays, even if we couldn’t use them running a proper virtual environment, but was told no. Questions to determine when an actual demo might be possible—late in the day? Tomorrow?— were met with discouragingly noncommittal responses.

Finally getting one of the headsets in hand, I did my best to learn what little I could without seeing it in action. The weight was indeed lighter than any headset I’ve tried, other than the Bigscreen Beyond; more like an oddly heavy pair of sunglasses than an XR headset.

It wasn’t as comfortable on the bridge of my nose as I’d hoped, but pressing down on the stems slightly to take a little of the weight off of the front (as the to-be-included, but apparently yet-to-be-manufactured head strap would do) made it comfortable enough that wearing them for a full work day should be reasonable. The lenses appeared to be of high quality (but I won’t be able to fully judge them until the headset is fully functional) and the build and materials looked reasonably good.

As glum looking attendees filed through the demo area, trying on the lifeless headsets, a single engineer worked feverishly in a corner. It was clear from the glow emitting from his headset that it was powered-on. A crowd gathered to watch him from just outside the demo area, with an armed guard periodically asking them to step back, as the clock ticked down to the time when the event would be required to vacate the venue.

Less than half an hour before the event ended, the engineer sprinted to a demo station, headset in hand, and a small handful of us were ushered back in. We were each given a minute or so to try on the headset… but it still wasn’t exactly what we expected.

The Visor was displaying a series of images and videos, but it was spreading the image across both eyes without adjusting for stereo overlap. This meant that the only way to view it without discomfort was to close one eye. There was no head-tracking or virtual environment, just a video playing directly to the displays.

From what I could see, the optics looked very good, with high clarity, a relatively large sweet spot, and minimal distortion at the edges, when the headset was properly aligned. The screen itself appeared to be vibrant, sharp, and very high resolution. You could not make out individual pixels. It was difficult to say given the limited content and brief demo time, but it looked like it was plausibly in the same league as the displays in Apple Vision Pro in terms of resolving power.

While the cameras on the headset appeared to be legitimate, it was impossible to test the passthrough view, hand-tracking, eye-tracking, positional-tracking stability, and a host of other critical features.

I asked if I could drive back to Austin for a proper demo once the software was up and running, and was promised that I could. If and when such a demo takes place, I’ll have more to share.

After the brief and botched demo, Bijoy acknowledged that Founders Edition headsets would not be shipping soon after the event (as was originally announced). While the hardware may be close to final, I wasn’t shown anything that gave me confidence that the necessary software is approaching completion.

The Immersed crew seems sincere in their intention to bring the Visor to market, and their goals and design choices strike me as good ones. That said, I’ll be holding off on ordering one until I see signs that the software is stable, nearing feature-complete, and the promised features work as intended. I’ll be watching their progress closely, as, I’m sure, will their financial backers and pre-order customers.