Next Reality

Cirrus Aircraft launched Let's Go Fly! on June 2, a free native Apple Vision Pro app built around a seven-minute immersive flight over the American Southwest in a Cirrus SR22T, followed by an augmented reality walkthrough of full-scale SR Series and Vision Jet models placed in the user's physical environment. The app is free on the App Store. It was built, according to Cirrus, specifically for settings where a real aircraft cannot be present: trade shows, premium retail locations, shopping...

L'Atitude 52°N Smart Glasses vs Meta: Can the Camera Gap Be Closed?

VSS Unity flew again last week for the first time in nearly two years, and the flight itself was the least interesting part. Virgin Galactic returned its prototype Spaceship to the skies above Spaceport America in New Mexico on May 27, not to resume commercial tourism but to rehearse for a new-vehicle test program the company says will be substantially shorter than anything it has done before. Whether that compressed timeline is achievable is the question the coming months will answer.

Sandbox VR signed a three-unit franchise agreement with New York operator JLG Ventures in early 2025, anchored by a 10-year lease for roughly 11,000 square feet at 761-777 Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. The Sandbox VR New York City flagship was originally targeted to open in fall 2025; as of June 2026, that date has passed and the site's current operational status could not be confirmed from available sources. This piece treats the deal as reported at signing and examines what it signals about a...

The headline finding from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman that Apple's first smart glasses will have no in-lens display keeps getting reported as a limitation. It isn't. Judged against the actual competitive landscape, the latest Apple smart glasses leak describes something more interesting than another AR headset: a mass-market eyewear play designed to compete with Ray-Ban and Warby Parker as much as with Meta.

Images of dark-finish Vision Pro components leaked this week via X account @LusiRoy8, showing power strap and audio pod parts that appear structurally identical to the current headset, distinguished only by a black finish never seen on any retail product, MacRumors reported. Similar black Apple Vision hardware has surfaced in prior leaks, and the account claims the parts belong to an upcoming second-generation Vision Pro. That claim is worth examining carefully, because the evidence for a black...

The Binary Mill, the indie studio behind 2024 co-op shooter Into Black, is unveiling a first look at its next VR game today at the Ruff Talk VR Gaming Showcase, starting at 1:00 PM ET on the Ruff Talk VR YouTube channel. The appearance was first noted by UploadVR and picked up by Send106 two days ago. The game itself remains unnamed. That makes the venue choice the most useful thing to read right now.

Apple has added a power wheelchair control feature to Vision Pro, letting users operate a compatible chair using only their gaze. The announcement was published in Apple's newsroom earlier this May, and it extends the headset's existing eye-tracking hardware into physical assistive mobility. At launch, Apple Vision Pro wheelchair control is limited to the United States and works with exactly two drive-system partners. Many technical specifics remain undisclosed.

Meta has opened the built-in display on its Ray-Ban Display glasses to third-party developers for the first time, according to an announcement made last week. Outside developers can now push content directly into the wearer's right lens rather than routing information through a phone notification or voice response. Per PPC Land, this marks the first time third-party developers can target the built-in display on a consumer AI glasses product already on retail shelves.

Apple's Vision Pro avatars look meaningfully better in visionOS 26. Hair renders like hair. Eyelashes are visible. Side profiles no longer collapse into something from an old PS2 title. The Verge confirmed in hands-on testing that the end result is "vastly improved." The visual case for Apple Vision Pro Personas improvements is real, and visionOS 26 makes it.

Xiaomi president Lu Weibing confirmed at MWC Barcelona two and a half months ago that a next-generation XRING chip will debut in a Chinese device before the end of 2026, less than twelve months after the XRING O1 launched last year. Lu's words to CNBC were direct: "Going forward, we should most likely release a yearly upgrade." That is not a vague aspiration. It is a stated release cadence from the company's president, and it changes how XRING should be read not as a one-time engineering...

Preorders for the Asus ROG Xreal R1 AR glasses went live today at Best Buy, priced at $849, with worldwide shipping set for June 1. XREAL's own storefront opens for preorders on May 17. ASUS and XREAL describe the R1 as the world's first 240Hz micro-OLED gaming AR glasses, per the ASUS Pressroom and as of today, not a single independent reviewer has tested them.

Early this 2026, Meta committed nearly $2 million in grants to outside developers building on its AI glasses platform. What the company has not announced: an app store, public SDK documentation, or any named third-party games. That gap between the grants and the missing infrastructure tells the real story of where this platform stands.

The previous wave of spatial computing in gaming failed a usability test so basic it's almost embarrassing in retrospect. Headsets were heavy, warm, and isolating. Fine for a 30-minute demo; impractical as a category people would actually live with. The underlying ideas were sound. The form factor was the problem, and nobody solved it.

Samsung XR glasses One UI 9 code reveals two-product roadmap

The free iRacing Connect app landed on the App Store this week, making iRacing Apple Vision Pro support official and available to anyone running visionOS 26.4 or later. The catch is baked into the architecture: the simulation runs entirely on a Windows PC, with frames encoded and transmitted wirelessly to the headset via NVIDIA CloudXR 6.0, per iRacing's support documentation published the same day. The Vision Pro receives the stream; it doesn't generate it.

Fashion smart glasses lead XR growth 3 hurdles still ahead

Google Gucci Smart Glasses Deal Explained: Android XR in 2027

Meta Quest Price Increase Fears Miss a Bigger Battery Problem

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported last October that Apple had shelved its only known Vision Pro successor project, redirecting staff toward smart glasses instead. That single move, combined with a production halt and a near-total collapse in marketing spend, points to something more deliberate than a product delay. A true next-generation Vision Pro release date, per Bloomberg, appears to be at least two years out, and the evidence suggests Apple arrived at that conclusion before most observers...

Apple shipped visionOS 26.5 for Vision Pro today as part of a coordinated rollout that also delivered tvOS 26.5 and HomePod 26.5, 9to5Mac reported. Apple's official changelog describes the visionOS 26.5 release as "performance and stability improvements" and nothing more. After more than a month in beta, no noteworthy user-facing features or changes were found, 9to5Mac confirmed.

Apple will likely unveil visionOS 27 at WWDC on June 8, and no credible feature leaks have surfaced yet, according to UploadVR. That absence of rumors is itself useful information. It forces a more grounded question: given what's already documented about why people are returning their Vision Pros, what would a meaningful visionOS 27 Vision Pro upgrade actually look like?

At SID Display Week in Los Angeles this week, a Samsung Display subsidiary showed off a glasses frame threaded with eMagin OLED microdisplays that project detailed, transparent video overlays into both lenses simultaneously. The image quality was striking. The frame was bolted to a table.

Galaxy XR 2D Apps into 3D: How Google's Auto-Spatialization Works

Apple LGTM Vision Pro Graphics: A New Approach to 4K Rendering

A study underway at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia is testing whether virtual reality can give autistic people a safer way to rehearse before a real interaction with police officers. The premise is direct: police encounters are among the most unpredictable and high-stakes situations an autistic person can face, and until now there has been no structured way to practice for them without real-world consequences attached.

A structured VR mindfulness program tested in school and community settings produced clinically meaningful anxiety reductions in more than four out of five adolescent participants, according to peer-reviewed findings published last December. The result is specific, the methodology is real-world, and the effect size is large. It is also, at this point, one study.

Cornell's DanXeReflect turns standard rehearsal video into a navigable 3D virtual studio, places dancers inside it via an XR headset, and earned an honorable mention at CHI '26, ACM's flagship human-computer interaction conference. The system lets dancers examine past performances as interactive avatars, annotate specific body parts with time-stamped notes, and share that feedback with collaborators, all from inside a reconstructed spatial environment a flat video screen cannot replicate.

Global VR headset shipments fell 14% year-over-year in the first half of 2025. In the same period, Meta reported Quest software engagement at an all-time high. Both numbers are true. Together, they describe a market that is neither dead nor healthy one where the question "is VR gaming dead" has a technically correct answer that obscures a much more uncomfortable one.

Before the Vision Pro existed as hardware, the demos that would define it were built on iPhones and iPads. That detail tends to get lost in conversations about headset versus phone AR, but it matters. The person who led that work, who helped create Encounter Dinosaurs, the interactive prehistoric-creatures experience that shipped preinstalled on Vision Pro, has spent the two and a half years since leaving Apple building a mobile AR app instead. That is not a retreat. It is an argument.

zSpace Q4 2025 Earnings: Revenue Collapse and Going-Concern Warning

New AR Research Turns Any Flat Surface Into a Touch Interface

Apple is accelerating development of smart glasses built around a version of Siri that acts on live visual input, not text commands. The question of how users will control those glasses, including whether Apple smart glasses hand gesture controls will feature at all, remains genuinely open. No source in current reporting has confirmed a specific input method beyond voice.

Apple has quietly signaled retreat on Vision Pro. The company slashed digital advertising for the headset by more than 95% year-over-year in the US and UK, halted production at its Chinese manufacturing partner Luxshare, and shelved Vision Air, the lighter, cheaper follow-on device that would have most directly addressed the two most-documented reasons people send the current headset back, per Financial Times data cited by PCMag and 9to5Mac. The Apple Vision Pro flop narrative, long circulating...

One surgeon has used the headset in hundreds of procedures. A major health system just launched a formal study. Here's what the evidence actually supports and what it doesn't.

The Veterans Health Administration has expanded clinical use of virtual reality therapy as VR technology has grown more affordable and capable, according to a VA systematic review published earlier this year. The same review cannot say it works better than the treatments it supplements. That gap between deployment and proof is where the real story lives.

John Ternus Apple Vision Pro comments are sparse by design. Apple's incoming CEO has said almost nothing on the record about the headset, and what exists in his place is reported internal positioning sourced primarily from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman: Ternus was reportedly wary of Vision Pro before it launched, and his wariness, per Gurman, was prescient. With Ternus set to replace Tim Cook this summer, understanding what the reporting actually says, and what it doesn't, matters for anyone trying...

The VITURE Beast XR glasses go on full sale today at $549, available through Amazon, Best Buy, and viture.com. Two specifications central to the device's premium positioning, 1200p/120Hz resolution and 6DoF spatial tracking, are not active at launch. VITURE's own product page confirms it. That gap is the story.

Looking Glass has unveiled the Musubi, a compact holographic photo frame that brings glasses-free 3D viewing to everyday consumers at an lower price point. This device represents a significant departure from the company's previous enterprise-focused displays, packaging their multi-view holographic light field display (HLD) technology into a consumer-friendly form factor. The launch comes as spatial computing gains momentum—as spatial computing gains momentum and AR/VR technologies mature,...

Apple's latest Apple's visionOS 26.4 documentation update has quietly introduced a game-changing capability that's about to transform how we think about high-performance applications on the Vision Pro. While most platform updates focus on incremental improvements, this release brings something fundamentally different: the technical foundation for truly demanding immersive experiences that were previously difficult on standalone VR hardware.