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Meta Reveals Next Generation Aria Glasses for Research and Experimentation

February 27, 2025 From roadtovr

Meta today revealed its next-gen glasses, Aria Gen 2, which the company intends to release to third-party researchers working on machine perception systems, AI and robotics.

The company revealed its first iteration of Project Aria back in 2020, showing off a sensor-rich pair of glasses which the company used internally to train its machine perception systems, ultimately tackling some of the most complex issues in creating practical, all-day augmented reality glasses of the future.

Since then, Meta’s first-gen Aria has found its way outside of company offices; early collaborations with BMW and a number of universities followed, including Carnegie Mellon, IIIT Hyderabad, University of Bristol, and University of Iowa, which used the glasses to tackle the a host of machine perception challenges.

Now, Meta has revealed Aria Gen 2. Like the first-gen device, Gen 2 doesn’t include displays of any type, though it now houses an upgraded sensor suite, including an RGB camera, position-tracking cameras, eye-tracking cameras, spatial microphones, IMUs, barometer, magnetometer, GNSS, and custom Meta silicon.

New to Aria Gen 2 are two new sensors embedded in the device’s nosepad: a photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensor for measuring heart rate and a contact microphone to distinguish the wearer’s voice from that of bystanders.

What’s more, Meta touts the 75g device’s all-day usability—making for 6-8 hours of active use—and its a foldable design.

The increasingly AI-rich device also features a slate of on-device machine perception systems, such as hand and eye-tracking, speech recognition, and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) tracking for positional awareness.

Aria Gen 2 | Image courtesy Meta

Meta envisions the Aria’s SLAM tracking will allow users to internally map and navigate indoor areas that don’t have good or detailed GPS coverage—aka, a visual positioning system (VPS) that could equally help you get around a city street and a find specific item in a store.

The company isn’t ready to distribute Aria Gen 2 just yet, although Meta says it will share more details over the coming months, which is slated to target both commercial and academic researchers.

One such early collaboration was with Envision, which announced in October it was working with Meta to provide Aria with a ‘Personal Accessibility Assistant’ to help blind and low-vision users navigate indoor spaces, locate items, and essentially act as a pair of ‘seeing eye’ glasses.

Envision and Meta showed off their latest work in a video (seen above), revealing how Aria Gen 2’s SLAM tracking and spatial audio can assist a blind user to navigate a supermarket by following a spatially correct homing ping that the user perceives as emanating from the correct area, which guides them to the desired item, such as a red onion, or Granny Smith apple.

This comes as Meta continues its push to release its first commercial AR device, which not only needs all of those systems highlighted in Aria, but also the ability to display stereo-correct information in a slim, all-day wearable package. It’s no small feat, considering displays have much higher compute and power requirements relative to Aria’s various machine perception systems.

One of Meta’s biggest ‘light house’ moments was the reveal of its AR prototype Orion in September, which does feature those compute and power-hungry display, yet still fitting into an impressively slim form-factor, owing to its separate wireless compute unit.

Orion | Image courtesy Meta

Orion, or rather an Orion-like AR device, isn’t going on sale anytime soon though. The internal prototype itself cost Meta nearly $10,000 per unit to build due to its difficult to scale silicon carbide lenses, which notably feature a class-leading 70 degree field-of-view (FOV).

Still, the race is heating up to get all of the right components and use cases up to snuff to release a commercial product, which is aiming to supplant smartphones as the dominant mobile computing platform. Meta hopes to launch such AR glasses before 2030, with other major companies hoping to do the same, including Apple, Samsung, and Google.

Filed Under: ar industry, AR News, News, XR Industry News

MIT Reality Hack Has Become a Focal Point for US East Coast XR Devs & Entrepreneurs

February 26, 2025 From roadtovr

While the XR industry’s major hubs are concentrated on the West Coast of the US, the MIT Reality Hack hackathon has become a focal point for XR developers and entrepreneurs on the East Coast of the US. Now in its eight year, the event has expanded with new opportunities for industry discussion and networking thanks to the concurrently held EXPERIENTIAL Conference. Executive Director Maria Rice offers an overview of this year’s hackathon and winners.

Image courtesy Maria Rice

Guest Article by Maria Rice

Maria is the Executive Director of MIT Reality Hack. For the last eight years, she has been instrumental in positioning the Hack as the world’s leading experiential technology community through the development of programs like the EXPERIENTIAL Innovation Conference, the Reality Scholars diversity fund, and the startup-focused Reality Hack Founders Lab.

From January 23–27, hundreds of top hackers-for-good—along with a roster of tech OGs and startup founders—descended on the MIT campus to attend the eighth annual MIT Reality Hack, the premiere hackathon for experiential technology.

The Hack was sponsored by a range of international players at the intersection of XR, AI, and deeptech. With AI development support from Lambda Labs, participants built functional prototypes using Meta Quest 3, Snap Spectacles, Qualcomm’s RB3g2 robotics kits, ShapesXR, Cognitive 3D, and STYLY.

Image courtesy Sean Chee

One of the most notable characteristics of this year’s MIT Reality Hack was the introduction of new hardware kits, including MEMS-based AR lenses from Maradin, a haptic exoskeleton from Haptikos, and an array of neurosensing gear from OpenBCI, including the Galea biosensing headset.

Image courtesy Sean Chee

With an unapologetic mission of hacking for good, MIT Reality Hack is most memorably distinguished by the dynamic energy generated by its participants and organizers. The five-day event stretched the hacking talents of some 600 participants to the limit, producing 78 innovative use cases and applications in XR and adjacent tech.

Image courtesy Sean Chee

Winning projects included YEIGO, an AR tool for ensuring that mobility aids (like walkers) are used with correct posture; CAREGIVR, an immersive platform for preparing families and caregivers for end-of-life care; and Tac-Man, a haptic input device for sculpting in VR.

Check out the full list of the 2025 winners in all hardware and software categories.

EXPERIENTIAL Conference Expands MIT Reality with New Opportunities for Industry Discussion and Networking

Image courtesy Sean Chee

Held alongside the MIT Reality Hack event, global attendees presented at the first-ever EXPERIENTIAL Innovation Conference at MIT; a one-day event envisioned as a ‘Davos of the spatial tech industry’. Cutting-edge research into the most challenging deeptech was demonstrated and debated within the context of learning innovation, vertical applications, and global development.

EXPERIENTIAL Conference was sponsored by IEEE Spectrum, Qualcomm, and Helsinki-based pioneer Distance Technologies.

In part to support the ‘hack-to-market’ initiative of the Founders Lab (one of Reality Hack’s community subprograms), EXPERIENTIAL featured two exciting company launches:

Limit Labs, founded by the leaders of VR/AR MIT, launched RoomSeed, a groundbreaking genAI tool informed by rigorous research.

Haptics company Haptikos launched with a new hand exoskeleton that brings a sense of touch to XR apps at a dramatically low price point with twice the precision of previous solutions.

Startup demos also included MIT spinout Three Space Lab and AI products from AUR+A, and Taiwan-based Meta Intelligence.

EXPERIENTIAL is shaped by the mandate set forth to extend Reality Hack’s inclusive technology focus beyond hacking and into the zeitgeist towards the promotion of creator economies. The program journeyed deep into the realms of both academic research and the business marketplace.

The conference kicked off with a fireside chat between two well known names in the industry: Tim Bajarin, founding analyst and Chairman of Creative Strategies and Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, who expounded over the course of an hour on the state of the XR industry, as moderated by AR pioneer Dan Cui.

Image courtesy Sean Chee

Bajarin also participated as a first-time judge at the Hack and wrote up his thoughts on Forbes, calling his experience “one of the highlights of my career”, after 40+ years in the tech industry.

The EXPERIENTIAL keynote was give by Qualcomm’s Senior VP & GM of XR, Ziad Asghar who explored the growing synergy of AI capabilities in XR devices, and the importance of events like MIT Reality hack in incubating the ideas and talent that drive rapidly evolving industries.

Image courtesy Sean Chee

Later in the conference a panel covering Global Initiatives Towards a Sustainable Future, saw MIT Senior Lecturer Ken Zolot moderate a conversation between keyholders representing the United Nations (UNICC), The World Bank Group, Inclusive AI Lab, and Qualcomm, and futurist & Global VP at HTC, Alvin Wang Graylin.

Panelists shared how they leverage experiential technology and hackathon initiatives to empower creator communities, drive economic growth, and enable new, more inclusive human experiences across industries and regions.

As noted by AWE co-founder and Reality Hack partner Ori Inbar: “XR is going mainstream, but to fully achieve this goal we need more seasoned XR builders and newcomers of all kinds to create diverse spatial experiences that matter to every single person on the planet. That’s how you conquer the mainstream!”

Companies interested in participating in the 2026 MIT Reality Hack and the EXPERIENTIAL Innovation Conference may reach out to the conference by contacting me here.

Filed Under: News, XR Industry News

AWE 2025 Speakers Include Oculus Founder, Meta’s VP of Metaverse Experiences, & ILM Immersive VP

February 17, 2025 From roadtovr

AWE USA 2025 is set to include speakers from some of the biggest names in the XR industry, including Oculus & Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, along with Jason Rubin—one of the only remaining early Oculus executives—who is presently Meta’s Vice President of Metaverse Experiences. Also on the roster is Vicki Dobbs Beck, the vice president of ILM Immersive, the studio behind XR adaptations of Star Wars, Marvel, and more.

AWE USA is one of the largest and longest-running XR-focused conferences in the world, and has become our must-go XR event.

This year AWE USA will be held in Long Beach, California from June 10th to 12th, and it’s expected to be the biggest yet, with more than 6,000 attendees, 300 exhibitors, 400 speakers, and a 150,000 Sqft expo floor. Early-bird tickets are still available, and Road to VR readers can get an exclusive 20% discount on tickets to the event.

Among the 400+ speakers giving presentations at the event are representatives of a wide range of XR industry companies, including Palmer Luckey, Jason Rubin, and Vicki Dobbs Beck.

Palmer Luckey | Image courtesy Palmer Luckey

Palmer Luckey is the founder of Oculus, the startup acquired by Meta in 2014 to kickstart the company’s XR ambitions. After overseeing the launch of Meta’s first major XR headset, the Oculus Rift CV1, Luckey was ousted from Meta following political backlash for his actions pertaining to the 2016 US presidential race.

Years later, Meta made up with Luckey by inviting him to see a preview of its latest AR headset (Project Orion). This was followed by a public apology from Meta’s top XR executive, Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, who said “I’m grateful for the impact you made [Meta] and in developing VR overall. Looking forward to showing you more of our work in the future.”

The ousting must have been heartwrenching for the Oculus founder who played no small part in making XR what it is today; but a tiny silver-lining did emerge… Luckey went on to found the military tech contractor Anduril, which has grown to its current valuation of around $18 billion—putting him in the very rare club of people who have founded more than one multi-billion dollar company.

Though his pivot to military tech appeared to take him far from his passion for XR, just last week Anduril announced it’s now spearheading the military AR headset project originally undertaken by Microsoft.

At the event we expect to hear Luckey talk more about this project and what it means for XR tech in America’s military forces.

Jason Rubin | Image courtesy GDC Showcase

AWE USA 2025 will also see a talk from Jason Rubin, one of the only remaining Oculus executives still at Meta, presently serving as the company’s Vice President of Metaverse Experiences.

Rubin joined Oculus in 2014 and was a key figure in guiding the early content investments and strategy following the company’s acquisition by Meta. Since then he has shuffled between quite a few roles within the company, with most pertaining to gaming content and partnerships.

At AWE we expect to hear Rubin talk more about Meta’s evolving vision for the metaverse.

Vicki Dobbs Beck | Image courtesy Lucasfilm

Rubin won’t be the only seasoned gaming executive present at the event. We’ll also hear from Vicki Dobbs Beck, the Vice President of Immersive Content at ILM Immersive, the interactive division of Lucasfilm.

As a co-founder of the division, Dobbs Beck has overseen the production of award-winning XR content that has brought huge IP into the immersive realm. That includes the likes of the Vader Immortal series and Marvel’s What If…? – An Immersive Experience, one of the first major productions to land on Apple Vision Pro.

During her talk we expect to hear more about what’s next for ILM Immersive and how the division expects story-driven immersive experiences to pan out with a growing number of standalone headsets in the market.


Road to VR is proud to be the Premier Media Partner of AWE USA 2025, allowing us to offer readers an exclusive 20% discount on tickets to the event.

Filed Under: News, XR Industry News

PSVR 2 Holiday Sales Volume Grew Massively Year-over-year on Amazon

February 12, 2025 From roadtovr

A big sale on PSVR 2 pushed the headset’s holiday sales volume on Amazon US higher than might have been expected, selling nearly five times more than last year.

PSVR 2’s Black Friday and holiday sale brought a huge 42% discount on the Horizon bundle of the headset, dropping the US price from $550 to $350.

Predictably, the sale increased the sales volume of the headset, but by even more than one might have expected. PSVR 2 saw nearly five times the peak sales volume on Amazon US during the 2024 holiday season as it did in 2023.

Granted, it’s important to note that the headset didn’t get any particularly big sales in the 2023 holiday season. But still, one might be inclined to think that if you cut the price of something by 50%, then you would expect to sell 50% more than you would have otherwise. In this case, we can see that PSVR 2 has a far different relationship between price and sales.

In 2024, Sony started the sale ahead of Black Friday and kept it running well into the new year. The sale lasted so long that it seems the company may have been trying to sell off stock, perhaps because it has a new SKU on the way (like a new bundle or lower cost redesign). While some have suggested that Sony could be losing faith in the headset and trying to do a firesale before discontinuing it, we think it’s likely the company continues to offer the headset at least until its next console cycle, even if it doesn’t put much weight behind it in the meantime.

Filed Under: News, PSVR 2 News & Reviews, XR Industry News

Oculus Founder’s Defense Company is Taking Over Microsoft’s Military AR Headset Project

February 12, 2025 From roadtovr

Palmer Luckey’s defense company Anduril is taking over Microsoft’s beleaguered Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program, which seeks to produce battlefield AR headsets for the United States Army.

Although couched as a “partnership” of sorts, Anduril says the deal—still pending Department of Defense approval—includes assuming oversight of production of IVAS, including future development of hardware and software, and delivery timelines.

Microsoft Azure will also serve as Anduril’s preferred cloud for AI workloads, which the firms say will ensure “high resiliency, sophisticated capabilities, flexibility and advanced security.”

According to information obtained by Breaking Defense, Anduril could be tasked with producing a limited number of the latest IVAS devices designed by Microsoft ahead of possible cancellation of the contract.

Concept testing in 2019, Image courtesy CNBC

Taking over the production also potentially gives Anduril valuable time to work with Army leaders on the program, essentially allowing Luckey’s defense company a head start on competing in IVAS Next, which re-opened the bidding process to other companies on February 11th.

Since the U.S. Army defense contract was awarded in 2019—worth up to $22 billion— Microsoft has faced an uphill battle to ruggedize and adapt the HoloLens 2-based platform to soldiers’ needs.

Early U.S. Army reports maintained the militarized AR headset suffered a host of issues during its prototyping stage, including early reliability issues, user discomfort, difficulties slimming down the form factor, and low field-of-view, which has stymied the project from scaling up to full deployment.

As reported by Inside Defense, IVAS Next’s initial request for information from January 22nd asked applicants how their solutions enabled human-machine integration while mitigating nausea and visual discomfort—largely seen as major issues plaguing Microsoft’s various iterations.

This follows a prior deal to integrate Anduril’s Lattice AI platform into Microsoft’s IVAS, announced in September 2024. Both firms emphasize AI’s role in national security, noting Lattice will provide “rapid AI-enabled situational awareness capabilities to enhance soldier safety and operational effectiveness.”

Filed Under: AR News, XR Industry News

Meta CTO: 2025 is a ‘Make or Break’ Year for Meta’s XR Ambitions, Internal Memo Reveals

February 4, 2025 From roadtovr

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth released an internal memo to employees, stating 2025 is going to be “the most critical year” for the company’s XR efforts yet, Business Insider reports.

Titled “2025: The Year of Greatness”, the memo (seen below) largely takes an inspirational tone, urging Reality Labs employees to do “the best work of your career right now.”

Bosworth, who also leads the company’s Reality Labs XR division, offers hope and motivation for teams to succeed, stating the company needs to “drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR.”

Bosworth also puts emphasis on the success of Horizon Worlds, Meta’s cross-platform social XR platform, noting the mobile version of the app “absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance.”

Image courtesy Meta

While inspirational, the memo also offers an existential warning:

“This year likely determines whether this entire [XR] effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure,” Bosworth says.

“On paper 2024 was our most successful year to date but we aren’t sitting around celebrating because know it isn’t enough,” he continues. “We haven’t actually made a dent in the world yet. The prize for good work is the opportunity to do great work.”

This follows news of a leadership shakeup at Reality Labs, announced by Bosworth last week in a leaked internal forum post obtained by Business Insider.

The post included info that Meta CTO Reality Labs COO Dan Reed is being replaced by Meta COO Javier Olivan, and that Reality Labs will work more closely with the company’s core business, as Bosworth stated the division has become “a positive driver for Meta’s overall brand.”

Late last month, Meta’s quarterly financial report revealed that Reality Lab saw its best ever Q4 revenue but, like in quarters past, it coincides with equally growing costs, which amounted to a record $1.08 billion in quarterly revenue, but also quarterly costs of $6.05 billion, making for quarterly loss of $4.97 billion.

Reality Labs is responsible not only for its Quest platform, its related services and research and development, but also Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, which are built in collaboration with EssilorLuxottica.

Now in its second generation, the device has proven successful it’s prompted Meta to not only extend its partnership with the French-Italian eyewear conglomerate into 2030, but also reportedly produce a premium pair of the smart glasses with a built-in display, tapped to launch sometime this year.

Here’s Bosworth’s full memo:

2025: The Year of Greatness

Next year is going to be the most critical year in my 8 years at Reality Labs. We have the best portfolio of products we’ve ever had in market and are pushing our advantage by launching half a dozen more AI powered wearables. We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance. If you don’t feel the weight of history on you then you aren’t paying attention. This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure.

I’ve been re-reading “Insanely Great,” Steven Levy’s history of the Macintosh computer. If you haven’t read it the book chronicles the incredible efforts of individuals working in teams of 1-3 to build a device that more than any other marked the consumer era of personal computing. What I find most fascinating about it is the way that even people who left the program on bad terms (it was not particularly well managed) speak about the work they did there with an immense sense of pride. There was a widespread cultural expectation, set by none other than a young Steve Jobs, that the work needed to be “insanely great.”

On paper 2024 was our most successful year to date but we aren’t sitting around celebrating because know it isn’t enough. We haven’t actually made a dent in the world yet. The prize for good work is the opportunity to do great work.

Greatness is our opportunity. We live in an incredible time of technological achievement and have placed ourselves at the center of it with our investments. There is a very good chance most of us will never get a chance like this again.

Greatness is a choice. Many people have ben at the precipice of opportunity and failed to achieve. For the most part they failed to even challenge themselves.
You should be doing the best work of your career right now. You should be pushing yourself to grow where needed and doubling down on your strengths. When you look back on this time I want you to feel like you did everything in your power to make the most of it.

You don’t need big teams to do great work. In fact, it may make it harder. One trend I’ve observed the last couple of years is that our smaller teams often go faster and achieve better results than our more generously funded teams. Not only that, they are much happier! In small teams there is no risk of falling into bad habits like design by committee. You should be so focused on results that being in a bunch of docs or meetings is too frustrating to bear.

The path is clear. You don’t need to come up with a bunch of new ideas to do this great work. Most people in the organization just need to execute on the work laid out before them to succeed. It is about operational excellence. It is about master craftsmanship. It is about filling our products with “Give A Damn”. This is about having pride in our work.

I will close with an Arnold Glasow quote: “Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.” 2025 is the year. Let’s be on fire.

Filed Under: Meta Quest 3 News & Reviews, News, XR Industry News

Meta’s VP of XR is Departing the Company Citing Family Health Concerns

February 3, 2025 From roadtovr

Meta’s VP of XR, Mark Rabkin, is departing the company after leading its XR efforts for more than four years. Rabkin cites family health issues as the primary driver for his departure.

Today Mark Rabkin announced his plan to leave the company in March. In his public announcement he said, “devs and fans [of XR]—I will leave you in good hands. More to come.” Which likely means we’ll soon learn who will take over the role in his place.

As Meta’s VP of XR for the last four years, Rabkin oversaw the launch of Quest 3, Quest 3S, and the latest platform developments, like Quest’s software rebranding to Horizon OS, the assimilation of App Lab into the Horizon OS store, and a significant push toward mixed reality and spatial computing on the company’s headsets.

Though Rabkin was VP of XR for some four years, he says he’s been at Meta for 18 in total, where he had started in 2007 as a “rowdy, slightly cocky, fresh-faced backend infrastructure C++ engineer in my twenties.”

According to his LinkedIn, Rabkin worked his way up to VP positions over the following decade. He joined the XR side of the company in 2019, first as the VP of XR Experiences before eventually becoming the VP of XR overall.

Filed Under: News, XR Industry News

Mindshow Unveils Enterprise Virtual Production Suite for XR Animation, Former Hulu Executive Signs on as COO

January 31, 2025 From roadtovr

Mindshow, the real-time CG animation company, unveiled its virtual production platform for enterprise partners looking to use XR headsets to speed up the animating process. The company additionally announced the appointment of David Baron as Chief Operating Officer, a founding executive at Hulu, and industry veteran of Fox Digital Media, Paramount, and Microsoft.

You might have heard of Mindshow when it first launched on Steam in 2017, giving anyone with a PC VR headset the ability to animate and capture everything from short skits to entire shows thanks to its virtual production tools. The app was delisted from Steam in 2020, ostensibly pointing to the company’s ambition to turn its once consumer-oriented platform into a enterprise toolset.

Now, Mindshow has unveiled that enterprise production suite, which allows select industry partners to animate in virtual studio sets using XR headsets, including Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest, merging real-time rendering with “asset ingest and character animation tools accessible across the entire production pipeline—from storyboarding to final pass,” the company says in a press statement.

Before its platform unveiling, Mindshow worked with a number of brands to create promotional videos and narrative content for Barbie, Hot Wheels, Monster High, and Enchantimals, as well as a slew of Cameos from Cheetos mascot Chester Cheetah.

While the company says it will continue to offer its full-service production studio though its Los Angeles-based location, the Mindshow platform is now available for licensing to select entertainment companies, sports organizations, and consumer brands.

The studio says Mindshow features proprietary lip-sync technology which converts pre-recorded audio into stylized animated facial performances and character movements. It also includes virtual studio cameras for in-app capture, motion capture for real-time character expression, and asset integration, allowing companies to rig existing 3D models for quick animation.

“Every step of animation requires a specialized tool—from assets to previsualization to rendering and review. This technical fragmentation bottlenecks creativity costing production teams time and money,” said Sharon Bordas, CEO of Mindshow. “Mindshow is purpose-built to integrate a growing ecosystem of virtual production capabilities as rapidly as cutting-edge content tools and technology hit the market, making studio-quality animation immediate and intuitive through a single platform.”

The company says its recent addition of streaming veteran David Baron as COO “underscores Mindshow’s commitment to scaling its enterprise software platform.”

Baron notes that Mindshow helps bands “move from concept to delivery in one production cycle, turning characters into multi-platform properties across social, streaming, previsualization, and beyond.”

Filed Under: News, XR Industry News

Meta Reality Labs Saw Record Quarterly Revenue in Q4 2024, But Also Record Costs

January 29, 2025 From roadtovr

In its quarterly financial results today, Meta revealed that its Reality Lab division saw its best ever Q4 revenue but, as before, this coincides with equally growing costs.

Meta’s Reality Labs division houses its metaverse and XR groups, and some of its AI initiatives.

During its Q4 2024 earnings call, Meta revealed that Reality Labs reached a record $1.08 billion in quarterly revenue, but also had its biggest quarter in terms of costs at $6.05 billion, resulting in a quarterly loss of $4.97 billion. This just barely beats the division’s previous revenue record of $1.07 billion in Q4 2023, and significantly beats it’s largest quarter for costs of operation in Q4 2023 at $5.72 billion.

During the company’s Q4 2024 investor earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the “number of people using Quest and Horizon [Worlds] has been steadily growing,” and also that he believes 2025 is the year the company’s investments in improving the look and feel of Horizon Worlds will begin to pay off.

Regarding Q4 2024, however, Zuckerberg alluded to Meta’s Ray-Ban smartglasses as the main driver of the revenue milestone, saying that “Meta Ray-Ban are a real hit.”

But revenue is only half of the story, as Reality Labs’ growth in costs have far exceeded its growth in revenue. In Q4 2024, the division cost the company $6.05 billion to run. When offset by its revenue, that still puts the Reality Labs $4.97 billion in the red for Q4 2024.

To date, Meta has spent a whopping $69 billion on Reality Lab since Q4 2020, but it has only brought in $9.19 billion in the same period.

While the numbers are staggering, Zuckerberg continues to insist that Reality Labs costs are long-term investments that will eventually pay off; he’s previously warned investors that Reality Labs’ costs would continue to grow, and ultimately might not flourish until the 2030s.

Filed Under: XR Industry News

Google Acquires Vive Engineering Talent for $250M, Raising Questions About HTC’s Next Move

January 23, 2025 From roadtovr

Google has acquired a number of HTC’s XR engineers for $250 million, something the company says will “accelerate the development of the Android XR platform across the headsets and glasses ecosystem.”

Google’s announcement of Android XR last month represents a critical shift in the competitive landscape, as Samsung will ostensibly be the first to launch a headset running Android XR. Excitement for familiar faces offering up competition in the consumer XR space was tempered somewhat by the usual questions surrounding Google’s ability to commit to the project long-term.

While Google has addressed some of those underlying concerns in a Road to VR exclusive, which you can read more about here, that doesn’t reduce the laundry list of products and services killed by the company over the years, one of which includes Google Daydream, the company’s first real attempt at entering the XR space proper back in 2016.

Google Daydream View (2017) | Image courtesy Google

Now, Google announced it’s signed an agreement with HTC to acquire a number of HTC’s XR engineers for $250 million. The details of the agreement are still thin, although it’s possible Google is tapping HTC for its hardware talent in a bid to secure a more solid foundation in the modern XR segment.

“We’ve been investing in XR for more than a decade, and just last month introduced the Android XR platform with our strategic industry partners,” Google says in the announcement. “Today we signed an agreement to welcome some of the HTC VIVE engineering team to Google, which is subject to customary closing conditions. They are an incredibly strong technical team with a proven track record in the VR space, and we are looking forward to working with them to accelerate the development of the Android XR platform across the headsets and glasses ecosystem.”

Strangely enough, this isn’t the first time Google paid top dollar for HTC engineers. In 2017, the company shelled out a princely sum to gut HTC of its smartphone engineering talent, amounting to $1.1 billion. One year later, HTC merged its smartphone and VR divisions, which signaled HTC was putting increased emphasis on its XR ambitions.

Since the details of the deal aren’t public, where that leaves HTC for now is still a mystery. The Taoyuan, Taiwan-based company is principally involved in producing XR headsets for enterprise and prosumers, such as its latest headset Vive Focus Vision, a $1,000 standalone mixed reality headset that packs in a mishmash of specs from Vive Focus 3 (2021) and Vive Elite XR (2023).

That said, HTC has dabbled with non-XR devices in the recent past, although very little to hang its hat on. In 2018, the company released HTC Exodus 1, the crypto-phone that seemed encouraging enough for the company to release its follow-up one year later. In 2019, it released an at-home 5G hub, which capitalized on the first wave of buzz surrounding 5G. None of those devices are currently being sold by HTC, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Filed Under: News, XR Industry News

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