The XR Week Peek (2026.07.06): Samsung smartglasses leaked, Meta introduces a subscription for its glasses, and more!

I’m finally back in Italy, and I can spend a few weeks here, recovering from all the long trips I had. It was really insightful going to China, the US, and Germany, and I think now I have a better view of what is happening in the XR ecosystem. But now my body needs some rest 🙂
 
 And do you know how you can get a better view of what is happening in the XR ecosystem, too? By reading this roundup of news…

Top news of the week

A leak shows a preview of Samsung glasses

We all know that Google, Samsung, and eyewear partners like Gentle Monster are working together on smartglasses that are similar to the Ray-Ban Meta. Now, thanks to a series of leaks, we have some more info about them.
 
 The first leak on Samsung glasses showed some screenshots of the mobile companion app that you can use to configure the glasses. This app doesn’t feel much different than all the other companion apps that are available from the other glasses in the space. It allows you to pair the glasses with your phone, configure their settings, manage the photos and videos you shot, etc…
 
 Another leak instead revealed what gestures you can use to interact with the glasses. Here, “gestures” are not intended as hand-tracking gestures, in the Oculus Quest sense, but more like swiping interactions on the temples of the glasses. And in this case, again, Samsung glasses are not being very original: for instance, you can swipe left and right with one finger to change the music track you are listening to; or you can touch the touchpad to pause and play the execution of music; or you can swipe left/right with two fingers to change the volume.
 
 You can also shoot pictures and videos using the button on the right temple. When you shoot a picture, a preview appears on your smartwatch and on the Now Bar of your phone, so you may decide to import it and use it on the fly.
 
 It’s interesting to get some more insights on these smart glasses. Most things we are discovering make the Samsung glasses feel very similar to the other glasses on the market. I wonder how Samsung is thinking about differentiating itself.

More info

Other relevant news

You now have to pay a subscription to use your Ray-Ban Meta glasses at their fullest

Meta has quietly added a new subscription, Meta One, which is required to unlock all the features of your glasses.
 
 The first thing affected by this decision is “Conversation Focus”, the feature that lets you hear more clearly the people you are looking at, reducing the background noise. Now you have only 3 hours of this feature free (with no indication of your current usage). If you want more time, you have to pay for the Meta One Premium subscription, so you get up to 15 hours. When probed by the journalists, Meta clarified that this feature has not been limited because of AI rate limits: it runs locally on the glasses, so there are no cloud AI limits to respect. Basically, it is just being artificially limited for the sake of getting money with the subscription. 
 
 A Meta spokesperson told Wired that the company will “start testing new optional subscription plans that offer more premium features and advanced capabilities for those who want to unlock more from our apps and AI glasses”. This means that in the future there will be new features blocked behind a paywall. I guess Ray-Ban Meta users will be very happy about that (#sarcasm).
 
 I guess this move shows how desperate Meta is to get revenues from its only truly successful wearable product. Since an app store is not ready yet, they try to squeeze money out of a subscription. And it would even make sense if the subscription were to have extra features that require frontier models running on Meta cloud. But the fact that I have to pay $20 a month for a Meta One Premium subscription just to run a local model on my glasses, after I have already spent $3–400 euros to buy them, is utterly ridiculous.

More info (Meta AI subscription for glasses — The Verge)
More info (Meta AI subscription for glasses — Mashable)

Rokid teases new AR glasses and AI-driven OS

At the Rokid Open Day in China, Rokid has given some insights about its upcoming releases.
 
 The company has announced its upcoming Rokid AR glasses, full 6DOF AR glasses that have some similarities with XREAL Aura. The glasses are very lightweight and offload their computation to an external puck. The processor is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, the field of view is 58°, and the resolution is 3840×1200 at a 90Hz refresh rate. Luminosity is just 600nits, so they seem more suitable for indoor use. The displays used are microOLED, and the optical solution is defined as “hybrid waveguide”, so these are not birdbath glasses like XREAL Aura. The AI camera has 4032×3024 pixels, so it is possible to do quite a good image analysis of what is in front of the user’s eyes. There is no info about price and release date, though. It would be interesting to know these details to understand how this can be a competitor for Aura.
 
 Together with these new glasses, Rokid also gave updates about its AR software ecosystem. The company is integrating WeChat payments into glasses, and this is pretty huge in China, because thanks to this, Rokid is the first company whose glasses are compatible with both Alipay and WeChat Pay. Rokid also announced support for 4D Gaussian Splats thanks to a partnership with 4DV.ai.
 
 Talking about the operating system, Rokid defines YodaOS as the first OS completely dedicated to AI glasses. It integrates AIUI, a UI completely powered by AI. For instance, when you ask a question to the AI assistant, AIUI understands what the best format is to show this data. So if you ask about the stock market, the glasses may show you an infographic about the market instead of a wall of text.
 
 Last but not least, Rokid also talked about privacy and how it is working to make sure that the privacy LED can not be disabled without disabling the whole camera system.
 
 With this event, Rokid confirmed to be one of the most interesting AR/smartglasses companies in the world. It would be nice if it were more interested in the overseas market like XREAL.
 
 (Thanks to the mysterious person for the tip!)

More info (Rokid Open Day / 1)
More info (Rokid Open Day / 2)

News worth a mention

PortalVR has been launched on Steam

Greg Fodor has launched on Steam his creation PortalVR, which lets everyone play VR games on a flatscreen using alternative controllers like Joy-Cons or phones to substitute for the VR controllers. 
 
 PortalVR got a very controversial reception. On one side, people appreciated that it lets people without a headset enjoy VR games. On the other side, VR purists say that a VR game should just be enjoyed in VR and not on a flatscreen. My point of view is that more possibilities are always better than fewer possibilities, so this application is a good thing: if you don’t like it, you just don’t buy it and don’t use it. I also think it’s great to enable accessibility for people who cannot wear a VR headset.
 
 The application costs around 15€, but it has been discounted for the launch.

More info

Memomind succeeds in its Kickstarter campaign

Memomind is a new AI hardware brand whose glasses don’t feature a camera. They were announced at CES, and now their Kickstarter campaign, which was asking the ridiculous amount of $10,000 (which in the hardware sector are barely enough to buy a pizza for all the employees), has passed the $500,000 mark (which is enough to barely do something).
 
 Memomind glasses will come in three variants and are specialized in all those tasks that do not require a camera, like AI translation, navigation, and note-taking. Feel free to order them on Kickstarter… but I have to warn you that I ordered some other smart glasses (not from Memomind) on Kickstarter 10 months ago and they have not arrived yet, so you should expect some delays for sure.

More info

Two interesting BCI news

If you are into Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI), these two pieces of news are for sure going to intrigue you:

• Meta has announced Brain2Qwerty v2. Using EEG and MEG waves read through a non-invasive sensor, the system is able to guess which world you are thinking about. The obtained rate is 61%, which is too little to be usable, but it’s a big jump ahead from the 8% of the other methods. The problem is that this accurate brainwave reader requires a huge machine and can only be used in a chamber that shields the user from external electromagnetic interference.
• Neuralink has announced that it is now able to install its devices in the brain with a new transdural procedure. Unlike Meta, Neuralink believes that the only way to reliably read brain signals is by putting sensors directly into the brain. Up to now, the surgery required to install the device involved making a hole in your skull until your brain was uncovered. Now, with this new innovative procedure, a hole is still needed, but there is no need to fully uncover the brain anymore: you don’t need to cut a hole through the dura. The dura is the thick membrane that protects the brain, and leaving it almost untouched makes the operation faster and safer. It is a big innovation in the field.

It is interesting to see advancements both in invasive and non-invasive BCIs. We’ll see which one of the two categories proves to be the most promising one.

More info (Meta’s Brain2Qwerty v2)
More info (Neuralink’s transdural procedure)

Discord lands on the Quest Store

Finally, Discord, one of the most-used apps by gamers, has arrived on the Quest Store. People were already able to use Discord through the Quest Browser, but now there is also a native official app for all Quest users to enjoy. There is a problem, though: currently, the app is affected by various bugs. It is very RAM-hungry, and some people are experiencing crashes while using it.

More info (Discord on Quest — Road To VR)
More info (Discord on Quest — Upload VR)

Some news about content

• Next year, Gorilla Tag is going mobile with a flatscreen version called Monke Mayhem
• A fan-made VR port of Nintendo 64 classic Perfect Dark is out now on Quest and PC VR
• Upload VR interviewed the team behind ArtQuest VR and asked them about the story and the motivations behind the application

More info (Gorilla Tag)
More info (Perfect Dark VR)
More info (ArtQuest VR)

Some reviews about content

• Lanesplit VR starts from a good concept about racing in VR, but it is crippled by bad design choices, like the inability to steer using VR controllers
• High Horns is an upcoming arm-based locomotion social hangout climbing game that tries to become another successful clone of Gorilla Tag
• The Castle is a dungeon-themed immersive VR experience built to teach electrical concepts through a series of escape-style challenges. It is quite well made.

More info (Lanesplit VR)
More info (High Horns)
More info (The Castle)

Other news

Sony is discontinuing physical disks and goes fully digital

Learn more

The state of Illinois bans smartglasses for people that are driving

Learn more

News from partners (and friends)

Interested in a PhD position in XR technologies for music?

The University of Trento is looking for people interested in joining a research project about the musical metaverse as a PhD position. If you want to spend some months in Italy and, at the same time, experiment with AR, VR, and music, this can be an interesting opportunity! I’m also involved in the project, so we may even potentially meet at a certain point. Read the job description and apply 🙂
Read the job description

Sponsored Area

No sponsors, just fun this week

Visit Unknown Website

Some XR fun

A great comment to read for the game studio, a horrible comment to read for the wife
Funny link

As long as it works…
Funny link

The evolution of game boxes
Funny link

Using GitHub Copilot with the latest Fable model
Funny link

Acronyms: you’re not choosing them well.
Funny link

Donate for good

Like last week, also this week in this final paragraph I won’t ask you to donate to my blog, but to the poor people who are facing the consequences of the war. Please donate to the Red Cross to handle the current humanitarian situation in Ukraine. I will leave you the link to do that below.
 
 Let me take a moment before to thank anyway all my Patreon donors for the support they give to me:

• Alex Gonzalez VR
• DeoVR
• GenVR
• Eduardo Siman
• Jonn Fredericks
• Jean-Marc Duyckaerts
• Reynaldo T Zabala
• Richard Penny
• Terry xR. Schussler
• Ilias Kapouranis
• Paolo Leoncini
• Immersive.international
• Nikk Mitchell and the great FXG team
• Jake Rubin
• Alexis Huille
• Raghu Bathina
• Chris Koomen
• Cognitive3D
• Wisear (Yacine Achiakh)
• Masterpiece X
• Dimo Pepelyashev
• Carol Dalrymple
• Keith Bradner
• Fabrizio Carimati
• Field Of Vision
• Jennifer Granger
• Jason Moore
• Steve Biggs
• Julio Cesar Bolivar
• Jan Schroeder
• Kai Curtis
• Francesco Strada
• Sikaar Keita
• Ramin Assadollahi
• Juan Sotelo
• Andrew Sheldon
• Chris Madsen
• Horacio Torrendell
• Andrew Deutsch
• Fabien Benetou
• Tatiana Kartashova
• Marco “BeyondTheCastle” Arena
• Eloi Gerard
• Adam Boyd
• Jeremy Dalton
• Joel Ward
• Alex P
• Lynn Eades
• Donald P
• Casie Lane
• Catherine Henry
• Qcreator
• Ristband (Anne McKinnon & Roman Rappak)
• Stephen Robnett
• KaihatsuJai
• Christopher Boyd
• Don Williams
• Giuseppe Pippi
• Mark Frederiksen
• Ken Lin
• Sebastien Poivre
• Ixn91
• Chris Madsen
• Sb
• Boule Petanque
• Pieter Siekerman
• Enrico Poli
• Vooiage Technologies
• Caroline
• Liam James O’Malley
• Hillary Charnas
• Wil Stevens
• Francesco Salizzoni
• Alan Smithson
• Steve R
• Brentwahn
• Michael Gaebler
• Tiago Silva
• Matt Cool
• Mark G
• Simplex
• Gregory F Gorsuch
• Paul Shay
• Paul Hadley
• Matias Nassi

And now here you are the link to donate:

Support The Red Cross in Ukraine

(Header image by Android Authority)