XR Industry News

Lumus, the company that developed the waveguide optic used in Meta’s Ray-Ban Display smart glasses, says it has achieved a 70° field-of-view in a new design revealed this week at CES 2026. This conveniently matches the 70° field-of-view that Meta achieved in its ‘Orion’ prototype, but only with the use of novel materials.

The News

Back in 2024, Meta revealed its first AR glasses prototype, codenamed Orion. One of the prototype’s big innovations was its ability to squeeze a 70° field-of-view into such a small form-factor. This was made possible with the use of unique waveguide optics made with silicon carbide, a novel material that enabled the wider field-of-view thanks to its greater refractive index.

In 2025, Meta talked about the challenges of manufacturing silicon carbide waveguides, affordably, at scale. While the company said progress was being made, it still conceded that the work is ongoing.

“We’ve successfully shown that silicon carbide can flex across electronics and photonics. It’s a material that could have future applications in quantum computing. And we’re seeing signs that it’s possible to significantly reduce the cost. There’s a lot of work left to be done, but the potential upside here is huge,” the company said at the time.

But now Lumus, the company that developed the waveguides in Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses says it has achieved a 70° field-of-view in its glass waveguides. The company claims it’s the “world’s first geometric waveguide to surpass a 70° FOV.”

The company announced that it is showing the new ZOE waveguide this week at CES 2026. Renders provided by the company show the company’s latest prototype to include the ZOE optics (though it’s worth noting that Lumus’ prototypes typically do not include on-board battery, compute, or tracking hardware, which would add bulk to any real product based on ZOE).

My Take

My gut tells me it probably isn’t a coincidence that Lumus has been aiming for a 70° field-of-view, which just happens to match what Meta achieved with its Orion prototype. Most likely, the company was tasked (implicitly or maybe even directly) with doing exactly that—proving that its waveguides could reach the 70° benchmark without using silicon carbide.

Beyond simply achieving a 70° field-of-view as a proof-of-concept, Lumus says the ZOE optic is made with the same process as its other glass waveguides. That’s a big deal, because the company has already proven that such waveguides can be manufactured at scale, thanks to the use of its waveguides in Ray-Ban Display, Meta’s first smart glasses with a display.

That means Lumus’ ZOE waveguide is most definitely on the shortlist for what Meta could use in its first pair of wide field-of-view AR glasses, which the company said it hopes to bring to market before 2030.

Granted, field-of-view isn’t everything. When it comes to optics, everything is a tradeoff. Increased field-of-view can impact brightness, PPD, and various visual artifacts. Without being able to see the new ZOE optic for myself, it’s hard to say whether or not Lumus has something truly new here, or if they’ve simply boosted field-of-view by trading other downsides.

I expect I’ll have a chance to see the ZOE optic later this year at AWE 2026 where I usually meet with Lumus to see their latest developments. In the meantime, I’ve also reached out to the company to learn more about how it reached the 70° field-of-view and what tradeoffs it did or didn’t have to make to get there.

A Chinese company which mass produces many of the best known headsets in the industry has shared a new compact MR headset reference design which sets expectations for 2026.

Goertek is a little-known but massively important player in the XR industry. The company is a key enabler in the production of XR headsets as it provides reference designs which function as blueprints for consumer companies to build headsets, and handles mass production for some of the best known headsets in the industry.

At CES 2026, Goertek revealed its latest MR headset reference design. Reference designs like this act as a blueprint for any company that wants to put their own spin on the device and take it to market. Rather than a prototype—which might use novel materials or techniques that aren’t yet mass producible—reference designs like this represent a fully functional set of ready-to-manufacture components with tangible costs and delivery dates.

There isn’t a lot of info available on the reference design yet, except what has been officially stated by Goertek:

An Ultra-Lightweight MR Reference Design showcases system-level optimizations, reducing the weight of a 4K MR headset to approximately 100 grams. It delivers retinal-level clarity (38 PPD) within a 100-degree field of view, with Video See-Through (VST) and 6DoF [tracking].

We’ve reached out to Goertek for details, but in the meantime many questions remain.

Considering the incredible 100g weight of the headset, it seems almost certain that this reference design does not include on-board compute or battery. For comparison, Quest 3, even with a soft strap, weighs in at 515g.

That means the headset would need to rely on a tethered compute/battery pack, or some other host device, to function. This would follow the trend of headsets like Vision Pro and Galaxy XR which both offload the battery weight to a tethered battery.

Adding to the confusion, Goertek calling the headset an “MR reference design” would generally be understood to mean a standalone device, but in the one photo we’ve been able to find of the device in use so far (courtesy CNFOL), it appears to be part of the company’s “PCVR Software Suite” display station, and looks to be tethered directly to the PC in front of the user.

In any case, the reference design shows us what kind of resolution and field-of-view can be expected from headsets in 2026 with this compact form-factor, even if the design doesn’t have its own compute/battery.

Likely the reference design is meant to show the form-factor while leaving it up to customer companies to decide if they would bring it to market as a standalone or tethered headset.

Apple’s Vice President of Human Interface design, Alan Dye, is leaving the company to lead a new studio within Meta’s Reality Labs division. The move appears to be aimed at raising the bar on the user experience of Meta’s glasses and headsets.

The News

According to his LinkedIn profile, Alan Dye spent nearly 20 years as Apple’s Vice President of Human Interface Design. He was a driving force behind the company’s UI and UX direction, including Apple’s most recent ‘Liquid Glass’ interface overhaul and the VisionOS interface that’s the foundation of Vision Pro.

Now Dye is heading to Meta to lead a “new creative studio within Reality Labs,” according to an announcement by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“The new studio [led by Dye] will bring together design, fashion, and technology to define the next generation of our products and experiences. Our idea is to treat intelligence as a new design material and imagine what becomes possible when it is abundant, capable, and human-centered,” Zuckerberg said. “We plan to elevate design within Meta, and pull together a talented group with a combination of craft, creative vision, systems thinking, and deep experience building iconic products that bridge hardware and software.”

The new studio within Reality Labs will also include Billy Sorrentino, another high level Apple designer; Joshua To, who has led interface design at Reality Labs; Meta’s industrial design team, led by Pete Bristol; and art teams led by Jason Rubin, a longtime Meta executive that has been with the company since its 2014 acquisition of Oculus.

“We’re entering a new era where AI glasses and other devices will change how we connect with technology and each other. The potential is enormous, but what matters most is making these experiences feel natural and truly centered around people. With this new studio, we’re focused on making every interaction thoughtful, intuitive, and built to serve people,” said Zuckerberg.

My Take

I’ve been ranting about the fundamental issues of the Quest user experience and interface (UX & UI) for literally years at this point. Meta has largely hit it out of the park with its hardware design, but the software side of things has lagged far behind what we would expect from one of the world’s leading software companies. A post on X from less than a month ago sums up my thoughts:

It’s crazy to see Meta take one step forward with its Quest UI and two steps back, over and over again for years.

They keep piling on new features with seemingly no top-down vision for how the interface should work or feel. The Quest interface is as scattered, confusing, and unpolished as ever.

The new Navigator is an improvement for simply accessing app icons, but it feels like it’s using a completely different paradigm than the rest of the window / panel management interface. Not to mention that the system interface speaks a vastly different language than the Horizon interface.

I have completely lost faith that Meta will ever get a handle on this after watching the interface meander in random directions year after year, punctuated by “refreshes” that look promising but end up being forgotten about 6 months later.

It seems Meta is trying to course-correct before things get further out of hand. If pulling in one of the world’s most experienced individuals at creating cohesive UX & UI at scale is what it takes, then I’m glad to see it happening.

Apple has set a high bar for how easy a headset should be to use. I use both Vision Pro and Quest on a regular basis, and moving between them is a night-and-day difference in usability and polish. And as I’ve said before, the high cost of Vision Pro has little to do with why its interface works so much better; the high level design decisions—which would work similarly well on any headset—are a much more significant factor.

Back when Meta was still called Facebook, the company had a famous motto: “Move fast and break things.” Although the company no longer champions this motto, it seems like it has had a hard time leaving it behind. The scattered, unpolished, and constantly shifting nature of the Quest interface could hardly embody the motto more clearly.

“Move fast and break things” might have worked great in the world of web development, but when it comes to creating a completely new interface paradigm for the brand new medium of VR, it hasn’t worked so well.

Of course, Dye’s onboarding and the new studio within Reality Labs isn’t only about Quest. In fact, it might not even be mostly about Quest. If I’ve learned anything about Zuckerberg over the years, it’s that he’s a very long-term thinker and does what he can to move his company where it needs to go to be in the right place 5 or 10 years down the road.

And in 5 to 10 years, Zuckerberg hopes Meta will be dominant, not just with immersive headsets, but AI smart glasses (and likely unreleased devices) too. This new team will likely not be focused on fixing the current state of the Quest interface, but instead trying to define a cohesive UX & UI for the company’s entire ecosystem of devices.

With Alan Dye heading to Meta, there’s a good chance that he will bring with him decades of Apple design processes that have worked well for the company over many years. But I have a feeling it will be a significant challenge for him to change “move fast and break things” to “move slow and polish things” within Meta.