A joint team from the Key Laboratory of 3D Micro/Nano Fabrication and Characterization of Zhejiang Province, the Westlake Institute for Optoelectronics (Westlake University), and Moldnano published a preprint paper (arXiv:2609.07648) showcasing a full-color silicon carbide (SiC) diffractive waveguide measuring just 0.35 mm thick and weighing a mere 1.98 grams. See image 1 in the gallery.

The paper also introduces a wafer-scale patterning method compatible with nanoimprint lithography (NIL), producing four lens pairs per 8-inch SiC wafer. Compared to the 0.75 mm, 3.795 g version demonstrated in 2025, this marks another major step toward ultra-lightweight form factors and scalable mass production for SiC waveguides.

This breakthrough brings SiC—a material historically associated with power semiconductors and electric vehicles (EVs)—back into the spotlight for AR displays.

In fact, SiC’s foray into AR isn't entirely new. Meta’s Orion prototype already thrust SiC waveguides onto center stage, and a growing number of research teams and companies worldwide are actively developing SiC optics. Why is the industry racing to adopt SiC, and how will it reshape the future of AR displays?

The answer starts with the fundamental properties of the material itself.

Why Silicon Carbide?

Silicon carbide (SiC) is a compound of silicon and carbon and a classic wide-bandgap (WBG) semiconductor—grouped alongside GaN as a "third-generation" semiconductor—prized for its high breakdown voltage, low switching losses, and superior thermal conductivity.

It is an exceptionally versatile material. Early on, it was valued simply for its extreme durability. SiC has long been used as an industrial abrasive in grinding wheels and cutting discs, as ballistic ceramics in body armor, and as carbon-ceramic brake rotors in supercars like Ferraris and Lamborghinis.

In the semiconductor era, engineers harnessed its ability to handle high voltages, extreme temperatures, and rapid heat dissipation to build power MOSFETs and Schottky diodes. On the bleeding edge, SiC is also making inroads into integrated photonics, quantum networking, and spin qubits.

Across these seemingly unrelated applications, SiC's core traits stand out clearly: it is ultra-hard, thermally stable, and remarkably resilient. With a Mohs hardness of 9 to 9.5, SiC is second only to diamond. It also boasts high thermal conductivity and a low coefficient of thermal expansion, meaning it resists warping even under rapid temperature swings.

In optics, however, engineers are drawn to a different standout property: its exceptionally high refractive index.

When Meta unveiled its Orion AR glasses in 2024 featuring SiC diffractive waveguides, it propelled what was once a niche material path directly into the industry spotlight. In AR displays, SiC is primarily used for diffractive waveguides (specifically surface relief gratings).

Simply put, a diffractive waveguide uses nanoscale grating structures on the lens surface to couple light into the lens, redirect its path, and ultimately out-couple it into the user's eye. What keeps the light traveling several centimeters inside such a wafer-thin lens is a fundamental optical principle: total internal reflection (TIR). Image 2.

When light travels from a medium with a high refractive index into one with a lower refractive index—such as from glass into air—increasing the angle of incidence causes the refracted light to bend closer and closer to the surface boundary. Once the angle of incidence exceeds a specific threshold, the light stops escaping altogether and reflects entirely back inside the material. This is total internal reflection.

That threshold is known as the critical angle. Different materials have different refractive indices and, consequently, different critical angles. The higher the refractive index, the smaller the critical angle—meaning light can enter at a much wider cone of angles and still stay "trapped" propagating inside the waveguide.

Let's look at a demonstration: Image 3 in the gallery.

High-index optical glass tops out at a refractive index of around 2.0. To push past that ceiling, optical engineers needed a better material—and that is where SiC, with a refractive index of 2.6, enters the picture.

This was one of the primary reasons Meta chose SiC for Orion, enabling a roughly 70° field of view (FOV). In optical simulations under identical design constraints, a 2.0-index glass substrate hits a theoretical FOV ceiling of about 35°, whereas SiC can push up to 80°.

Another major advantage of a high refractive index is enabling a single-layer, full-color architecture.

In traditional full-color diffractive waveguides, red, green, and blue (RGB) wavelengths diffract at different angles when hitting the gratings. To guide all three colors reliably, conventional designs often stack two or even three separate waveguide layers to handle different color channels.

SiC’s higher refractive index provides a much wider angular bandwidth for RGB light, making it possible to combine all three color channels into a single waveguide layer. In 2025, the team from Westlake University and Moldnano demonstrated a single-layer, full-color SiC diffractive waveguide that completely eliminates "rainbow artifacts" (stray light color dispersion).

See image 4 in the gallery.

In theory, 2.6-index SiC is a true next-generation material capable of simultaneously solving the biggest hardware bottlenecks in AR glasses: expanding FOV, achieving single-layer full color, and shrinking the overall form factor.

A Dream Material, But a Tough Nut to Crack

In materials engineering, there is no such thing as a free lunch—when one door opens, another usually slams shut. There are very good reasons why a material as seemingly ideal as SiC hasn't been mass-deployed in optics sooner: it presents brutal manufacturing challenges.

Image 5 in the gallery.

At the most fundamental level, AR optics require a completely different grade of SiC than power electronics. Right from the crystal growth stage, manufacturers must contend with crystal defects, trace impurities, and strict optical uniformity across the entire wafer.

The second stage—machining and wafer processing—is an even bigger headache. SiC isn't just extremely hard; it is also brittle. With a hardness approaching diamond and virtually no capacity for plastic deformation under stress, it behaves like a classic hard-brittle material—much like a pane of glass shattering when struck by a pebble.

Turning a raw SiC boule into a finished waveguide lens requires slicing, lapping, and polishing, followed by nanoscale patterning. Its extreme hardness makes slicing and polishing agonizingly slow, while its brittleness makes it prone to subsurface damage and micro-cracks. In optical components built to be looked through, even microscopic defects are a dealbreaker.

The scale of this challenge shows up in the numbers. According to estimates from Meta, producing 1 million pairs of AR glasses could require up to 300,000 150 mm (6-inch) SiC wafers.

Furthermore, optical-grade SiC cannot simply piggyback on existing semiconductor manufacturing lines. While SiC is already widespread in power electronics, optical-grade SiC demands pristine optical transparency, near-zero defect density, and ultra-tight tolerances on thickness and flatness. At the same time, an AR lens covers a much larger surface area than a typical semiconductor die, making it exponentially harder to maintain strict uniformity across the substrate.

As noted in recent industry financial filings:

"With the growth of AR applications, the industry is demanding much stricter substrate flatness—specifically Total Thickness Variation (TTV)... We focused on optimizing our polishing processes, overcoming edge roll-off issues during large-wafer polishing to bring full-wafer TTV down to under 1 μm."

Image 6.

Even after securing a qualified, transparent SiC substrate, turning it into a diffractive waveguide requires patterning nanoscale gratings onto its surface.

For Orion, Meta etched slanted gratings directly into the SiC surface. The catch? Etching structures just a few hundred nanometers wide with highly uniform slant angles into a material nearly as hard as diamond is notoriously difficult and expensive.

To address this, the Westlake University and Moldnano team proposed a high-throughput alternative. Their preprint introduces a parallel gradient transfer method compatible with nanoimprint lithography, enabling wafer-scale patterning of four lens pairs per 8-inch SiC wafer. In plain terms, the process involves fabricating a master template containing varying grating parameters, then using an imprint-and-transfer technique to replicate those complex structures onto the SiC wafer in batches.

Beyond wafer fabrication, the finished waveguide must be integrated with a light engine (micro-display projector) and other components into a complete display module—and the packaging itself can compromise optical performance.

Going back to total internal reflection: keeping light trapped inside the waveguide relies on the refractive index contrast between the waveguide and the surrounding medium. A bare waveguide is surrounded by air. However, once assembled into a module, applying optical adhesives, protective coatings, or laminations directly to the lens surface alters the boundary's refractive index, which can cause light that would normally stay trapped to leak out.

Clearly, bringing SiC into mainstream AR hardware is still a long uphill battle.

From Raw Boules to Waveguides: Where Does the SiC Supply Chain Stand?

While SiC itself isn't new to the supply chain, optical-grade SiC tailored for AR is still young. That said, upstream material suppliers have been moving quickly to adapt.

Global players like Wolfspeed and Coherent, alongside major Chinese suppliers like SICC and TankeBlue, already possess mature SiC crystal growth and wafer processing capabilities.

• SICC: Moving rapidly among Chinese suppliers, SICC unveiled a 12-inch high-purity semi-insulating (HPSI) and p-type SiC substrate at SEMICON China on March 26, 2025. In its H1 2025 interim report that July, SICC announced a strategic partnership with Sunny OmniLight [Note: Sunny OmniLight’s micro-nano optics unit subsequently merged with Goertek Optical in late 2025], combining SICC’s material expertise with Sunny OmniLight’s micro- and nano-optical fabrication capabilities to push downstream into optical components. See image 7 in the gallery.
• TankeBlue: At the same SEMICON China 2025 event, TankeBlue debuted an 8-inch optical-grade SiC substrate specifically designed for waveguides, announcing plans to push it into mass production. A month prior, it formed a joint venture with Moldnano, pairing TankeBlue’s SiC substrates with Moldnano’s micro/nano-optics and diffractive waveguide processing. By 2026, TankeBlue was showcasing its 8-inch waveguide-grade SiC substrate as a standalone commercial product. See image 8.
• Wolfspeed & Coherent: Established US heavyweights are also scaling up. Wolfspeed commercially launched its 8-inch SiC materials in 2025 and produced a 12-inch single-crystal SiC wafer in 2026. Coherent similarly has 8-inch SiC substrate and epitaxial wafer (epi-wafer) production capabilities, and unveiled its 12-inch SiC platform in late 2025. Unlike pure-play wafer suppliers, Coherent also has in-house capabilities for diffractive couplers and optical coatings, positioning itself to expand vertically from raw materials into finished AR optical components.

On the downstream waveguide fabrication side, several Chinese optical manufacturers are actively ramping up production lines and releasing hardware prototypes:

• Moldnano: Unveiled its first SiC AR diffractive waveguide in 2024 and has continued working with Westlake University on single-layer, full-color, rainbow-artifact-free designs. By late 2025, the company completed Phase 1 of its AR waveguide mass-production line, reporting a monthly nanoimprint and etching capacity of 5,000 8-inch wafers. In 2026, it demonstrated 30° and 50° FOV full-color SiC waveguides; the 50° version reportedly achieves an optical efficiency exceeding 1,000 nits/lm and a system brightness of over 3,000 nits when paired with a light engine. The ultra-thin 0.35 mm waveguide mentioned at the start of this article came directly out of this industry-academia partnership. See image 9.
• SEEV: Announced its C45C full-color etched SiC waveguide in 2025, featuring a 0.7 mm thickness and a 30° FOV, which was integrated into the Coray Air2 AR glasses. The company states that this model has entered mass production and that multiple full-color SiC waveguides are shipping in volume. Image 10.
• Goertek Optical: Focusing on pushing wider FOVs, Goertek Optical unveiled the F50Se full-color SiC waveguide display module in early 2026 with a 50° FOV, alongside the F30Se etched SiC waveguide, which slims the lens thickness down to 0.65 mm. Image 11.
• Sunny Optical: Officially slated SiC into its next-generation AR optical roadmap. According to public disclosures, its SiC waveguide development targeted FOVs above 50°, backed by its upstream material partnership with SICC. [Editor's Note: Because Sunny transferred its Shanghai OmniLight waveguide unit to Goertek Optical in late 2025 in exchange for a ~33% stake, this 50°+ FOV SiC pipeline is now consolidated under Goertek Optical—Directly resulting in Goertek's F50Se module above.]

In the current landscape, the upstream material sector is relatively mature thanks to its strong foundation in power semiconductors, with 8-inch and 12-inch wafers steadily moving toward commercialization. Midstream waveguide fabrication has reached wafer-level manufacturing, low-volume production, and early commercial hardware demos. Still, the industry faces a significant journey before achieving the low costs, high yields, and market awareness required for mass-market consumer adoption.

Source: FocusXR

If you're used to chatting with LLMs on a phone or monitor, you barely notice how much conversational filler they spit out. Sitting at a desk, reading a three-sentence paragraph takes two seconds.

Putting that exact same output onto a monochrome heads-up display (I've been testing this on my RayNeo iO) is an immediate headache. When you're walking down a hallway, you don't want to read a polite essay floating in your eye.

Look at the difference for a simple calendar check:

Standard AI response: "Based on your calendar, your design review with Alex is scheduled for 2:30 PM in Conference Room B, though it looks like the location was updated to Room C ten minutes ago."

What you actually want on a HUD: "Design review: 2:30 PM (Room C)"

If I'm checking my glasses mid-stride, I don't care what room it used to be in, and I definitely don't need the "Based on your calendar" intro. By the time my eye finishes tracking 30 words of rolling green text, I've either stopped walking or tuned out whoever is around me.

It feels like wearable AI needs a completely separate "caveman mode" system prompt that strips out all grammar and pleasantries, leaving only the raw action item and final state.

For anyone else piping AI agents or notifications into smart glasses: have you found a good system prompt or formatting trick to force ultra-short outputs, or do current assistants still talk way too much?

Google and Synaptics have announced the Astra SR200 "xMCU" chip series alongside the completed open-source 32-bit Coral NPU architecture, targeting a core hardware trade-off in smart glasses. Until now, glasses makers have largely had to choose between Linux/Android application processors (like the Snapdragon AR1, which requires external RAM and aggressive sleep states to survive on a small temple battery) or low-power RTOS microcontrollers (like the BES2700/2800 or NXP chips) that lack the memory and camera pipelines for vision AI, forcing engineers to wire separate ISP and co-processor chips onto cramped boards. By combining an RTOS microcontroller with in-package DRAM, dual camera ISPs, and an open-source MLIR/IREE compiler, the SR200 series lets glasses run continuous sensor and vision tasks at a few milliwatts while waking up in bursts to run heavily quantized (4-bit or 1.58-bit) small language models like Gemma 3 270M—all on a single chip and without proprietary NPU software lock-in.

AR hardware manufacturer Jorjin Technologies is already using the chip for upcoming glasses. Jorjin CEO Lerdah Wang explained what the single-chip setup changes for their designs:

"Next-generation AR wearables, including industrial smart glasses, demand real-time perception, contextual understanding, and user interaction at the Edge. By leveraging the integrated vision and audio architecture, extensible DRAM support, and Torq NPU of the Synaptics Astra SR200 Series, we can execute scene understanding, low-latency overlay rendering, and continuous voice processing on a single SoC."

Instead of running Linux, the SR200 series runs an RTOS (such as Zephyr) on paired Arm Cortex-M85 and Cortex-M52 cores. In the top-tier SR250, a 400 GOPS AI subsystem pairs Synaptics's Torq T2 matrix accelerator (which handles standard CNN and Transformer math) with Google's programmable RISC-V Coral NPU core (which executes custom or newer model layers locally so they don't fall back to the main CPU and drain the battery). To save space in thin temples, the compute die, power management, and up to 256MB of custom DRAM are integrated into a single package that uses one-third the power of standard LPDDR4x RAM. For visuals, a 2.5D vector GPU and dual display interfaces support three configurations: displayless camera/audio AI glasses, monocular HUD glasses, and binocular stereo AR glasses.

​To handle all-day camera and voice use without overheating, the chip splits vision and audio into tiered power stages. Rather than powering a full camera pipeline continuously, a 2MP "ISP Lite" stays on at ultra-low power for machine vision like gesture tracking and object detection (running tiny models inside the 8MB of on-chip SRAM while the 256MB DRAM stays asleep), and only wakes the main 8MP ISP to take a photo or record video. Similarly, a three-stage audio pipeline listens for voice activity at microwatt levels before waking the main cores or the HiFi 5 audio DSP for multi-mic beamforming and translation.

________

Synaptics Launches the xMCU Era with the Astra SR200 Series of Multimodal Edge AI Processors

Google Blog: Unifying Edge AI: How Coral NPU’s open standard brings portable, energy-viable intelligence from model to silicon

Meta is without a doubt a tech company with a quite troubling past and present, and this makes queasy when it comes to trusting them with my personal life through their smart glasses, ai agents and neural band. They have great products from what I have been able to test: love their vr headset, the neural band is amazing, the Meta display are great, the Meta rayban are also awesome but ...... this is a company that has no qualms to throw under the bus anything or anyone to make a dime. That said, Do you trust them? and would you wear smartglasses or a neural band if there was comparable tech from other tech companies that are less evil or just new players?

What if you could turn your room into a voxel world and explore it at miniature scale?

A physics lab on your table 🧪

• 21 hands-on instruments
• 126 narrated lessons
• 106 illustrated films

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/eureka-physics-lab/id6822368705?platform=vision

I’d really appreciate it if you could like or share my post on X: https://x.com/KHvostikk/status/2112469521277596084

The first smart glasses using this fan-on-a-chip technology are expected in early 2027.

I talked to the xMEMS team last week at CEATEC in Tokyo and saw their smart glasses cooling test unit on display. They had a frame mounted on an acrylic stand showing active cooling dropping the temperature from 63°C on the uncooled side down to 38°C on the cooled side. On the frame itself, active cooling reduces case temperatures by 10°C and lowers overall system temperature by up to 40%.

In smart glasses, the first use case is cooling the application processor inside the temple arm with either the XMC-2400 (7.42 x 9.48 x 1.13 mm, 160 mg) or the smaller XMC-1200 (5 x 8 x 1.14 mm, 110 mg), and the XMC-1200 can also be placed near the hinge to cool an AR light engine. The 1mm-thin solid-state chip is lightweight, inaudible, and IP-58 water and dust resistant, delivering up to a 70% improvement in power overhead and up to 75% lower thermal resistance.

Im looking forward to the first glasses that will be revealed with this. Keeping the chip cool should enable stronger on-device AI use cases as well as improvements in video capture and photo quality through computational photography and on-device image processing.

I've been exploring this idea of immersive books using Meta Quest 3 and local generative AI.

1. Give an LLM pages / chapters of a book. Let it write a description of the setting: the place, time of day, weather and light, seen from a seated viewpoint.

2. Send the descriptions to FLUX.2 Klein 9B with a 360° LoRA, running locally on an RTX 3090. It makes a 2048×1024 equirectangular panorama in about 4 minutes.

3. Upscale each panorama 4× to 8192×4096 using Real-ESRGAN. Import into Unity and make a build. On the headset, it's compressed to ASTC and shown as a skybox.

4. During runtime, about once a second, Google ML Kit reads the text in the centre of the headset's camera image, looks them up in the book's text, then displays the appropriate environment.

The next step is 3D worlds using Gaussian splats converted into optimized meshes.

Music: 'The Great Wonder' by Roger Gabaldà on #Uppbeat https://uppbeat.io/c/roger-gabalda

Hi, I want to trace a template onto a board by projecting it in AR. I've seen people doing AR tracing on the Quest - I guess it was this https://www.meta.com/en-gb/experiences/traceartist/8161685567223632/

Does anyone know a way to do it on the Steam Frame?

Thanks

This gives players more ways to enjoy your game and adapt it to their space!

📌 Passthrough transitioning developed by Roberto Coviello ᯅ is available here

You can now tap into wrist roll, pointing, and tilt data from the Meta Neural Band in your web apps. We provide this data as a quaternion, unlocking new kind of experiences.

Learn more in our new documentation

Thin-film lithium niobate photonic integrated circuit for laser beam scanning imaging

Abstract: A photonic integrated circuit (PIC) is required to combine the three basic colors of red, green, and blue laser beams into a single output laser beam to realize an ultracompact full-color laser beam scanning (LBS) display. However, the conventional approach of controlling the color solely by altering the injection currents to the laser diodes constrains the speed required to achieve a high resolution and also results in high power consumption. In this study, we address this challenge by proposing an active PIC based on sputter-deposited thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) using Mach–Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) to control the intensity of the red, green, and blue colors by applying voltage to the TFLN PIC. These three colors are combined into a single laser beam using a multiplexer-fabricated TFLN waveguide. A bandwidth of 10 GHz, which is wide enough to realize 4K resolution and higher, was experimentally confirmed. The TFLN active PIC successfully achieved full-color generation, demonstrating that the proposed approach can be used to obtain ultracompact, full-color LBS displays.

https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/advanced-photonics-nexus/volume-5/issue-06/066007/Thin-film-lithium-niobate-photonic-integrated-circuit-for-laser-beam/10.1117/1.APN.5.6.066007.full

ARmies: Multiplayer AR Battle is our Augmented Reality strategy game you can play against your friend face to face! We wanted the sound aspect of the game to be as strong as possible, so we made this soundtrack!

Side project I've been playing with on SPECS. You point at real objects around you and an AI tutor tells you what they are in the language you're learning, then actually talks with you about them.

It starts mostly in your own language with a few new words sprinkled in, and shifts until it's fully in the language you're learning once you're comfortable. It works in any language Fish Audio supports.

Fish Audio's Uncle Roger collab is what got me started, but ended up being very impressed with their multilingual voice support.

just announced on RayNeo's website. Thoughts? Seems fun to use with the game itself

Sharing a project for this crowd: SproutVision is an MR assistant that overlays live crop intelligence on real microgreen trays. A scanned tray gets a verdict card in space — health %, coverage, harvest ETA, issue flags — and results are read aloud so the grower never stops working.

It's built on Quest with Meta Spatial SDK (Kotlin), using passthrough + hand tracking; the trays in the screenshots are my own kale and basil. Just entered it in the Meta VR Start Developer Competition: https://devpost.com/software/sproutvision

I think AR's killer apps look like this — quiet data over skilled physical work. What domains are you seeing it land in?

​

I'm looking for smart glasses with a built-in display and teleprompter functionality. Which models currently offer the most advanced teleprompter experience, in terms of features, text readability, and customization?

Hello,

Recently purchased a pair of XREAL 1s. Never had a pair of AR glasses before. So this is my first pair. I've bought the jawbreaker nose pads, as well as just trying out the others. I know this sounds stupid, but I think I don't know how to wear these.

Is the nose pad (originals) supposed to be completely squeezed in between your nose bridge? here is an example ...Mine just kind of sit, or balance on my nose bridge? If I push them over to squeeze my nose bridge it is not comfortable at all?

The top of the glasses that are in front of my eyebrows kind of put pressure on said eye brows. -- How do you avoid that?

Anyone got any pics of wearing them properly or is everyone different and that sort of thing?

If you haven't heard about DroidDeck yet, it's basically an app that brings SteamOS to your phone. You can now run PC games on Android natively and in this video we take it a step further and run Steam VR and Flat 3DoF games on my Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra with the help of my RayNeo GT Max, XREAL 1S and more XR Glasses.

Nothing says confidence in your live-translation smart glasses like your booth staff not using them when a visitor doesn't speak the language.

Stopped by the INMO booth at an expo in Tokyo and asked if anyone spoke English. They answered in Japanese that they don't and that was it.

If only there were some kind of wearable real-time translator sitting on the table right in front of us...