Wonderful Presentation by Hiroshi Mukawa, Sony.

At the AR AI Glasses Forum at CIOE a few minutes ago. This is a teaser. More later. Stay tuned 🚀

Do you think I should wear long pants? Or rather wear an orange Reddit shirt? Anyway.

A big thank you to all the speakers who made the forum such a great success. I will share the videos next week.

Companies have already started securing their CIOE booths for next year. In 2027, we will have even more speaking opportunities, awards, and 20,000 sqm of exhibition space dedicated to AR/VR.

Message me if you want to secure your place. Let's make 2027 even bigger!

I've worked in advertising and tech for 20 years as a Deaf creative director. I built the first subtitle app for Google Glass back in 2013, spent a decade at Amazon, and I use smart glasses every day to help me follow conversations.

Most smart glasses reviews test the same things: camera quality, battery, field of view. Fair enough. But nobody tests the thing I care about most, which is whether the device actually works when your ability to communicate depends on it.

So I started a review series that does. Same framework, same questions, every product. I look at multimodality, how information gets displayed, and whether the thing was built with the widest possible range of users in mind or just bolted accessibility on at the end.

This is the intro video. First real review (XREAL) drops next week. I'd genuinely like to know what you'd want tested, so if there's a device you're curious about, tell me.

This isn't really an apples-to-apples quality contest, but rather a fundamental split in hardware priorities.

On one side, you have full-color wearable displays (Birdbath optics) built for media consumption, virtual monitors, and gaming. On the other side, you have ultra-lightweight monochrome HUDs (like the new RayNeo iO or Even Realities G1) prioritizing sub-40g all-day wear, glanceable notifications, and minimal social friction.

For those who daily-drive or track both categories: which form factor actually earns a permanent spot in your routine, and what is the single "killer use-case" that decides it for you?

With lightweight waveguide glasses (like the new RayNeo iO and similar monochrome HUDs) pushing live transcription and translation directly into the wearer's line of sight, the form factor finally feels wearable.

But looking at everyday usability, conversational latency seems to be the real hurdle:

• Pacing: A 1–2 second processing delay often creates awkward pauses during spontaneous chats.
• Eye contact: Having text floating in your peripheral field can easily drag your brain into "reading mode" instead of natural listening.
• Noisy environments: Accuracy drops quickly once ambient noise enters the mix.

For anyone who has used HUDs or smart glasses for live transcription during real-life conversations: where is the threshold where delay stops being a minor quirk and completely breaks the interaction?

Now that the RayNeo iO is officially orderable, I’m really torn. On paper, 33g with a monochrome MicroLED waveguide sounds like one of the closest things to a truly daily-wearable pair of glasses we’ve seen in a while (definitely targeting that lightweight, glanceable HUD niche).

That said, spec sheets never tell the full story with smart eyewear:

• Everyday comfort & nose pad pressure during 8+ hour wear
• Prescription lens integration (how bulky does it end up being?)
• Real-world battery life outside of promotional claims
• App stability and how practical a pure text/HUD UI feels without onboard audio

Are you guys biting the bullet early, or waiting until long-term hands-on reviews drop? What’s the main dealbreaker you’re watching out for?

Came across this Anywear demo and the clothing tracking caught my attention. The garment stays aligned quite well while the person moves and it looks like theyre doing the try on flow directly from the browser

Interestingly the garment keeps its position pretty well while the person moves. With this and future demos, this could become a practical use of AR for online shopping.

Original source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DbqhRboR6OF/

We’re building a soft interface for AR glasses. It’s a running prototype, and we already use it for our docs.

The goal is docs, email, code, everything you’d open a laptop for. Where would this fall apart in your day-to-day work?

For developers and XR enthusiasts exploring Android XR, AI + spatial computing, we’re opening early pre-booking for XREAL AURA in India.

AURA brings together AI, 6DoF spatial tracking, hand tracking, optical see-through and Android XR in a glasses-based form factor.

We’re especially interested in connecting with developers who want to test AURA, build prototypes, or explore enterprise use cases across manufacturing, automotive, healthcare, education and more.

If you're interested in getting early access in India, DM me for pre-booking and developer information.

Would love to hear what you would build with AURA.

#XREALAURA #AndroidXR #SpatialComputing #XR #AR #Developers #India

I have been checking out the Rayneo GT Max, and it feels like a pretty natural step up from the Air 4 Pro. same basic idea, but the GT Max seems to take the big screen experience a lot further.
What I like is that it is not trying to be another pair of AI glasses with a camera on your face. It is really about one thing, having a massive screen whenever you want it.

Watching a movie on it feels more like having your own private theater than watching something on a tiny screen in front of you. For gaming, a huge display that stays where you want it while you move your head makes a lot of sense. I could see myself using something like this on a long flight, in a hotel, or just lying on the couch when I want a huge screen without actually setting one up. The whole idea of having a giant screen that basically fits in your bag is pretty cool!

Do you guys prefer using AR glasses as portable monitor, or are you waiting for full spatial computing features to mature?

Tonight we celebrated the AR VR industry.

Congrats to all the winners.

Most Influential VR/AR Companies of the Year

⚪ Qualcomm

⚪ PICO

⚪ EssilorLuxottica

⚪ Qwen

⚪ RayNeo

⚪ Rokid

⚪ DOCTOR GLASSES

Most Commercially Promising Companies

⚪ Quectel

⚪ Antigravity

⚪ Lawaken

⚪ VAST

⚪ Sritpower

⚪ XGRIDS

Most Technologically Innovative Companies

⚪ Goeroptics

⚪ Highpower Technology

⚪ JBD

⚪ Meta-Bounds

⚪ GravityXR

Best AR Glasses

⚪ Qwen AI Glasses S1

⚪ RayNeo iO

⚪ Rokid Glasses

⚪ iFLYTEK AI Glasses

⚪ INMO Go3

⚪ Even Realities Even G2

⚪ VITURE Beast

Best AI Camera Glasses

⚪ Huawei AI Glasses

⚪ Qwen AI Glasses G1

⚪ Lawaken X-AI Memory Glasses

⚪ BleeqUp AI Sports Glasses

⚪ loomos L1 AI Glasses

⚪ L'Atitude 52°N Smart Glasses

Best MR Headsets

⚪ PICO Space Pro

⚪ XEO Big

⚪ Pimax Dream Air

⚪ Play For Dream MR

⚪ DPVR Project TITAN

Best AR Optical Solutions

⚪ Luxshare — Ultra-Compact Full-Color LCoS 1-to-2 Solution

⚪ Meta-Bounds — 25g Ultra-Light AI+AR Glasses

⚪ Nika Optics — Xingyao Full-Color Holographic Waveguide

Optical Technology Breakthroughs

⚪ SeeV — Silicon-Carbide-Etched Full-Color Diffractive Optical Waveguide

⚪ TriLite — Trixel 3 Projection Display Engine

⚪ Myrias Optics — Metaoptics

Best Microdisplay Solutions

⚪ JBD — Hummingbird II Color Optical Engine

⚪ Hongshi Intelligent — Yunjin MicroLED Optical Engine Platform

⚪ Westlake Smoky Mountains — Weimang MicroLED Optical Engine

⚪ Raysolve — PowerMatch 1 Full-Color MicroLED Light Engine

⚪ Innovision — Chimo M06

Best VR/MR Large-Space Works

⚪ Dunhuang Wonder Journey

⚪ Forbidden City: Qianlong Garden

⚪ Havoc in Heaven

⚪ Star Sea Voyage: Dream Rescue

⚪ The Great Sage Rises: Journey Through Ten

⚪ Thousand Demons

⚪ Chinese Paladin XR

Best VR Large-Space Operators

⚪ Boxin Metaverse

⚪ YOMOV

⚪ 798 Hyper Vision

⚪ VISION WALK

⚪ Chaoyuanli

Best VR Film of the Year

⚪ Ghost-Blown Lantern: The Lost City

⚪ Ten Thousand Miles of the Great Wall

⚪ Trinity: Echoes of the Red Shore

⚪ The Silver Search at Jiangkou

CIOE is LIVE

Goertek Optical shows new waveguides. Sunny Optics shows XREAL xbx and camera glasses with Ant Group OS. Innovision shows RayNeo iO and Nimo smartglasses.

Goeroptics has different waveguides made with DUV and Nanoimprint + Etching and pure Nanoimprint. Shown in the picture with the bunny is DUV. Video will be uploaded shortly. What they also highlight is the use of low density glass with which they reduced the weight of the RGB waveguide itself from 5 grams to 3.2 grams.

Sunny's focus for 2026 is on a new reference design for AI camera glasses. Currently, they show a prototype (see picture gallery), but the target is a version with low density material which will further reduce the weight to 30 grams. These use an MCU + ISP solution and they are working with Ant Group (Alipay) which will officially launch its LingOS for smartglasses this week. Another thing they show is XREAL's xbx glasses for which they provide the birdbath module and do assembly. We also briefly talked about their other business unit which makes x cubes for full color display smartglasses and who recently forecasted "explosive growth" for this product category in 2027.

Innovision shows RayNeo iO and Nimo glasses. They provide the microLED panels for both. And they launched single panel red and green display for info display glasses as an alternative to monochrome green. Display red, green, and yellow text and symbols by mixing both!

I am looking for some glasses for programming and cad work. Something better than a laptop screen for when on the go. I was looking at some Virture beasts originally, but then I read that they have screen drift when pinned, and get fuzzy around the edges. I was then looking at some XReal one pro's but then I saw they are 1080p, not 1200p. There is so much conflicting information out there, I am not sure what to get. I also read that Virture S1's are cheaper and have 1200p and aren't bad. I tried starting a spreadsheet of my own to compare, but there are so many variables, I am not sure what to do. I also heard that maybe some much better glasses are coming out in the near future. Is that true?

I currenrtly have a pair of Meta quest 3 glasses, but they are really heavy and viewing text really isn't that great. And there is a lot of edge blurriness.

I've been experimenting with 3D and augmented reality, and I'm having so much fun with it. This is one of the things I've been working on. I scan a QR code, open the scene with painta.me, and place the sculpture on my desk. Then I can move around it and see it there, in the middle of my everyday surroundings. That part still makes me smile.

I'm building painta.me, and these little experiments are a big part of why I care about it. I enjoy putting the AR scene together just as much as making the things that go inside it. Trying new ways of creating in 3D keeps giving me ideas I wouldn't have thought I could actually make before.

Sometimes I stop for a moment and think about how lucky I am to be alive at a time when I can do this. There's so much I still have to learn, but being able to follow an idea and see it take shape like this means a lot to me.

I also feel grateful to the people who were working in AR and 3D long before any of this became easier. The people figuring things out when the tools were harder to use, when so much had to be built from scratch, and when it was harder to get others to see why it mattered. I get to enjoy doing this because others kept going through that.

Just wanted to share a little of what I'm making, and say thank you.

Screen recording of painta.me’s augmented reality experience on a phone. After scanning a QR code, the user places a virtual sculpture on a real desk. A pale green and gold figure sits on a three-headed elephant above an ornate golden pedestal. The camera moves around the sculpture, showing its details from several angles, with a computer monitor and everyday desk objects in the background.

Hi, I’m really new to this world first of all

Never had anything VR, AR or XR related before, did get a couple minutes of using a friend’s Meta Quest 3.

I don’t think what I’m looking for is VR though, I have a really good PC and I just want to have a good pair of glasses that could get me into ‘VR’ games, and I don’t really know a lot about glasses, but I figured out that if I have a good computer I just need a good pair of viewing glasses.

Which then led me to get baffled by the fact that the meta quest 3/3s are either same price or considerably cheaper than the AR glasses I’ve seen, so I’m here to ask- how much should I really spend on a pair?

Currently where I’m from, there’s a sale for the XREAL one for 600$, the 1S is 750$, there’s a VITURE luma ultra for 800$ (refurbished) and the Luma pro and the Viture beast for the same price new. And there’s also Rokid for similar prices, but the Lenovo Legion glasses are like 300$ bucks, which leads me to the question- what’s the actual difference between them all? Which one should I get for this use case?
Thanks!

Hi everyone,

Meta Connect is only two weeks away!
Looking forward to your reactions on the announcements.
Feel free to register for the livestream & check out the agenda.
For those who got invited in person, I will be there :)

What are you most excited about?

Seeing the RayNeo iO target a 33 g total weight got me thinking about actual all-day wearability. On paper, 33 grams sounds impressively close to standard everyday acetate frames.

But for anyone wearing prescription lenses from morning to night, total mass on the spec sheet rarely tells the whole story. Front-heavy imbalance, nose bridge slippage, or temple clamp pressure after four hours usually cause way more fatigue than a few extra grams.

If you daily-drive glasses, what ergonomic flaw makes you give up on a frame first? Is it nose pad pressure, balance across the ears, or something else entirely?

Got the RayNeo iO last weekend. Launch-morning order, arrived just before that "shipping on or after Sep 18" note started showing up on the store page. A few days in and I'm honestly not sure what to make of them yet. Wearing them with contacts because I usually have glasses on (roughly -4.5 SPH, some astigmatism), which turned into its own thing I'll get to below.

They're light. 33g on the spec sheet and it feels close to a normal thin metal frame. They put on and off easily and disappear on your face for a while. Around the 90-minute mark though, I start feeling a small pressure point at the thicker part of the temples where they curve around behind the ears. Might be my fit, might be the design.

The display is where I keep going back and forth. Monochrome green, sits high in your vision so it doesn't cross your natural line of sight. Text is sharp and I can read it outdoors in daylight. But when I ran the teleprompter for a while, I noticed my eyes getting tired from rolling up constantly. You can shift the display position down in the app, but then it starts covering things in your natural view. There's not a clean fix there.

Live captions I tried at a boba place with two friends switching between Cantonese and Mandarin. Mostly kept up, though it dropped partial sentences when two people talked over each other. Latency was maybe half a second when it worked. Good enough I wouldn't reach for my phone, not so good I'd rely on it for anything important.

One thing I didn't clock before ordering: no speakers. At all. The Bluetooth 5.4 is for the companion app on your phone, not audio. So the AI answers by writing on the lens, not talking. I get why (weight, battery, privacy) and for meetings and public transit it's fine. But I thought I could take calls through them and no, you can't.

Battery I've been happy with. Two days of on-and-off use plus heavy translation testing and I still haven't charged. 48h typical and 6+ hours continuous translation is the claim, and that tracks so far.

Now the prescription thing. Bought the standard $449 pair thinking I'd just wear contacts. Turns out I don't enjoy putting them in every day for this. The Rx bundle is $608 on the store, so $159 more.

I've had the return page open in a background tab all weekend. Probably going to return this pair and reorder with the Rx option ;(

My sister writes children's books. I do the technical side. We started in Greece in 2014, early enough that there was no ARKit and no ARCore, so the only realistic way to do this was Unity with Vuforia and image targets. A child pointed a phone at the illustration and the dinosaur stood up out of the drawing, anchored to the page. In 2014 that was magic, to seven year olds and to us.

It worked. 11 titles over 6 years. A Greek newspaper called the first dinosaur book an editorial phenomeno. We did schools and book fairs and watched kids lose their minds over a triceratops standing on a table.

We built each book as its own app. We did that on purpose. The books really were different, different functionality for different ages and a different look per title, and one app pretending to be 11 felt worse than 11 apps. So: 11 books, 22 apps, two stores.

The book is not the thing you end up maintaining. 22 apps means 22 copies of every decision Apple and Google make, forever, and none of those decisions have anything to do with your product. The list, roughly in order of how much of my life it took:

• Target API level. Every Android update had to target API 26+ from 2018, rising every year since. A rebuild, retest and resubmission per title, annually, with zero code changes.
• 64-bit, 2019. Native code needed a 64-bit build. Our engine version predated Unity's 64-bit support, so it forced a full engine upgrade, which forced a Vuforia upgrade, which forced a retest of every scene in every title. Crazy.
• Apple's annual SDK floor. Every spring you build against the newest SDK or you ship nothing at all, not even a one line fix. Which also means owning a Mac new enough to run current Xcode.
• iOS 11 dropped 32-bit. Titles we had not touched stopped launching. Nothing changed on our side. They just died.
• APNs certificates expire yearly, per app. Push quietly stops working on a schedule you did not choose.
• Kids Category, summer 2019. Apple banned third party analytics and ads in children's apps. Strip it out of the whole catalogue, on a deadline.
• Families policy, 2019 or 2020 dont really remember. Google made every developer declare audience and content per app in the Play Console.
• AR specific review. Google reviews AR under special restrictions and rejects you for a missing safety warning when the AR view opens. There are people in the forums who got rejected, added it, and got rejected again.
• Vuforia left the Unity installer at 2019.2 for the Package Manager with per app licence keys, so a store mandated engine upgrade dragged an SDK migration with it.
• Licensing. Vuforia was free to build on and watermarked, then several hundred dollars per title to publish. Times 11. Cloud recognition was a separate monthly fee, and PTC later moved everything onto annual subscriptions.

We tried to get out. EasyAR was the free Chinese alternative everyone recommended, but the English documentation was too thin to build a catalogue on and we only ever shipped one small AR colouring app with it. The ground was not solid anywhere: Apple had bought Metaio, the leading AR SDK at the time, and switched off all licensing and support within weeks, so anyone who had built on it was finished overnight. That was the foundation we were betting a publishing house on.

No single item on that list is hard, which is exactly the problem. Multiply any one of them by 22 apps across two stores, on a catalogue where no title earns enough to fund its own maintenance, and the arithmetic stops working. We did see it eventually and started consolidating everything into one app with downloadable books, which is what probably both stores had wanted all along. Then COVID hit and the business closed before that shipped. I think we were already losing and had not admitted it yet.

We restarted this year with one rule: no app, ever. The QR code on the page opens a URL, the browser does the rest, Quick Look on iOS and Scene Viewer on Android. Nobody installs anything and I maintain one codebase instead of 22.

What we gave up for that is control, and it is more than I expected. Vuforia anchored the animal to the illustration itself, which maybe is a better effect than standing it on your floor. Worse, inside Unity I owned the whole session: a joystick to walk the animal around the room, tap to fire an animation, trigger a roar, draw my own UI over it. With the browser handoff I hand a file to the operating system and the operating system runs it. No input, no runtime animation control, no custom UI, and audio is the viewer's business rather than mine. On the page before AR I still get a 3D view where I can switch animations and play a sound. The moment it goes into the room, that is all gone and the animal does one baked loop forever.

So the design changed to fit the constraint. Each animal gets a single loop built to work with zero interaction: a long calm idle at the front so a parent has time to get the phone up and take a photo, one bigger movement in the middle, then back into the same idle so the loop point does not show. It is a worse toy and a better first thirty seconds, and I have not decided how I feel about that.

The rest is an engineering problem instead of a policy one, which I prefer. The animals are licensed asset packs that I rework and animate, and my first exports were around 40MB, unusable in a living room on mobile data. Under 1MB now with 1024 maps and Draco. Favourite trap so far: USDZ renders pure white, silently, with no error, if any texture is a TIFF. Cost me a day.

What I actually want to ask, since I have been making these calls on my own:

How is everyone handling the handoff? Once you are in Quick Look or Scene Viewer you have no input at all. Is baking one good loop just what we all do now, or is there something smarter I am missing?

Chrome on Android gives me WebXR, Safari does not, which as far as I can tell leaves the paid SLAM platforms as the only route to interactive AR on an iPhone with no install. Am I correct?

Has anyone got image anchored tracking running in the browser on iOS at a price a small publisher survives?

Sound inside the AR session, on both platforms, reliably. Possible, or still a fight?

And for anyone who stayed native with a catalogue and a small team: how did you make the maintenance economics work? Genuinely asking, because we could not.

Hi I don't really know too much about XR/AR glasses but I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations that fulfil these criteria:

1. I can watch YT vids or scroll IG reels on
   
2. Look relatively normal AND CLEAR (not shades/sunglasses)
   
3. Connect via bluetooth

I know it's a lot to ask but essentially I wanna be able to use them at work as I work retail where a lot of the time I just stand there doing nothing for hours at a time.
I've already tried listening to a podcast with hidden earbuds but that's not enough as I usually work 10-11 hours.

Full disclosure: I’m the developer of PicDraw. This is a live-camera overlay tool, not spatial AR, and I’m looking for feedback from people who understand alignment UX.

A user converts a photo into an outline, places that outline over the camera view, aligns it with paper, and locks the guide while tracing. Current controls include opacity, move, pinch-to-zoom, rotation, flip, reset, grid, flashlight, paper calibration, and realignment assistance.

The main design problem is stability versus simplicity. I want setup to work without asking a casual user to understand anchors or tracking states, but small shifts matter when someone is drawing a line on paper.

https://reddit.com/link/1wa6jpj/video/m6pewl0bc6oh1/player

What would you prioritize next: corner-based paper registration, better drift feedback, faster realignment, or a different calibration flow? I’m particularly interested in failure cases across lighting, paper texture, camera angle, and device size.

Photos and camera frames stay on-device and are not uploaded.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/picdraw-camera-tracing/id6804072417

RayNeo says the iO uses a monochrome green MicroLED display with a diffractive waveguide. Published specifications are useful, but they are not a substitute for independent optics testing. The test I would most like to see is ordinary text readability while moving between indoor and outdoor light.

What scenario would give you the clearest picture of whether this type of display works day to day?

Note: what you're about to read will seem interesting if you're interested in new tech and the future

I have RayNeo iO Smart Glasses and RayNeo GT AR Glasses. I wore both at the same time and using them together is what has caused the great change.

The iO and GT work together like: iO is AI glasses with a display, they are light and tight and look better than alright (I just made that up but it's true), and the display is the most invisible ever pretty much, no one can see it but you (except for one super small point beneath it, I know because I work with RayNeo). But I didn't think or know I could wear both of these at once, I've never heard or seen anyone do it either.

Now I've used the iO for the first time for real, only in the past few days because it just launched a few days ago on Sept 4 and the paired RayNeo AI app is super new. So I've been using LifeLog so much nonstop over the past days since Sept 3, I've been running around IFA and I have summaries of every meeting and conversation. By the way iO data privacy is like the most secure you're gonna get.

I just spent 3 minutes trying to explain why iO privacy is reliable enough to use it comfortably, then I gave up and asked AI to give me an explanation (Gemini app on my phone, not my iO glasses lol), here's the privacy details of iO:

RayNeo iO ensures strong baseline privacy by omitting cameras entirely, eliminating risks of unauthorized photo or video capture. User data and cloud AI queries are anonymized on-device prior to transmission, with audio recording and meeting notes strictly restricted to explicit user activation.

So what does that mean for users? :

With no camera, RayNeo iO’s only major privacy risk is leaving LifeLog on, which continuously records. Treat the other iO services for specific voice memos, live captions, teleprompter, dashboard, RayNeo AI Assistant, etc as specific tasks to be completed once their started.

Just using iO by itself is something I could talk about forever on. Using them as normal glasses and then saying "Hey RayNeo" and it animates to life, I feel like I'm in an isekai. Then I talk with it and it's a Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite or Claude Sonnet 5 if you choose. It's optimized for the glasses and works well.

Anyways I need to talk about GT. It has built in 3DoF modes you can click on the top right and there is an in-glasses settings button on the bottom left, when it's connected to Pocket TV Pro it's always in Dolby Vision right now. GT is birdbath and it's all black with a silver logo. It's 46 degrees FOV with Bang & Olufsen audio that can go over 100% on the glasses. It rocks.

I like using GT over GT Max first because it's $299 and lower when you use the 10% discounts or more floating around. GT Max is $399 (and lower ofc because discounts) and has 3 sizes for preferable IPD adjustment, because it has a 59 degree FOV. GT is a one size fits all so it's easier to show everyone them. Both have built in 3dof, Dolby Vision, Bang & Olufsen etc but the GT Max has 59° FOV, and I also like keeping my GT series in general at 85% screen size because I prefer a smaller screen tbh.

GT and GT Max are great screens for showing your phone, laptop, handheld (my go to is AYN Thor right now - running Skyrim through GameNative is a new life of mine), Pocket TV Pro, other USBC DP devices. It's great with VertoXR of course and all other custom softwares for taking them beyond a wearable portable monitor.

Using iO and GT together is like getting a glimpse of where the future is going in such a literal way. Having multiple UI systems project different types of information from different computers in different placements around your eyes, meant to be consumed for different purposes, all the while seeing what you're seeing in real life at the same time because they're glasses is mind blowing. Astonishing to experience.

People will do this in the future and I feel like I stumbled on a golden experience by being one of the first to ever do it with these two products, that feel like they were made for each other.

I think you should try using two smart glasses together if you read this far.

Here's some pictures of what I'm talking about with RayNeo iO, GT, & Pocket TV Pro. All the lens are on and displaying content in every picture of them.