Virtual/Augmented/Mixed Reality News & Discussions

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Meta decides not to shut down Horizon Worlds on VR after all
Amanda Silberling
8:36 AM PDT · March 19, 2026

According to an Instagram post from Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth, Meta is not shutting down VR support for Horizon Worlds after all, which should come as a huge relief to, like, five people.

“We have decided, just today in fact, that we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR,” Bosworth said as part of an Instagram Stories Q&A after a fan of the app reached out to say they were “heartbroken” about the decision.

A Meta spokesperson confirmed Bosworth’s comments to TechCrunch.

Meta indicated earlier this year that it would stop supporting the social metaverse app on its Quest virtual reality headsets, which was a big concession for an app that Meta once envisioned as central to socializing in VR. As it turned out, very few people actually wanted to hang out in VR. On Tuesday, Meta confirmed on its community forums that Horizon Worlds would move to web and mobile only on June 15, but that announcement was quickly

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/19/meta- ... after-all/

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240-Hz gaming AR glasses are coming for your eyeballs
By Abhimanyu Ghoshal
May 19, 2026
https://newatlas.com/consumer-tech/240h ... -r1-price/

You can already work and game on a virtual screen using the current crop of augmented reality glasses – but what if you're a demanding gamer who lives for high-fidelity graphics and buttery smooth animation?

That's where the Asus ROG Xreal R1 glasses come in. They boast a refresh rate of 240 Hz on their Micro-OLED displays, making them arguably quicker than anything else on the market today. These were first revealed in January, and now we know they'll cost you US$849.

The keen-eyed among our readers will notice that the ROG glasses are largely the same inside and out as the Xreal One Pro, which cost $649. They both feature the aforementioned 1080p Micro-OLED panels to conjure up a 171-inch virtual display at 700 nits of brightness with a 57-degree field of view and 0.01-ms response time, and built-in speakers with Bose-tuned sound.

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Xreal, Google’s smartglasses partner, thinks it has finally mastered this notoriously tricky industry
Lucas Ropek
12:00 PM PDT · May 24, 2026

The smart glasses industry has long been a tortured dream of Silicon Valley. The premise is appealing enough: What if, to enjoy the benefits of mobile computing, people didn’t have to stare at their phones all day long and could, instead, simply wear a lightweight computing device on their face? Science fiction fans (a demographic that is strong in the tech industry) can see this vision perfectly.

However, the industry has — for much of the last decade — resembled a financial black hole into which gargantuan investments have been sunk and from which little to no profit has ever emerged.

“Everybody’s losing money,” said Chi Xu, the founder and CEO of the smart glasses company Xreal, which is a longtime partner of Google. I met Xu at Google’s I/O conference in Mountain View last week, where he was promoting Xreal’s Project Aura. That’s its latest effort to create a set of functional XR glasses that people actually want to use.

“That’s because it’s very hard, what we’re doing,” he said.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/24/xreal ... -industry/

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Xreal officially reveals its Android XR Aura glasses — without a pricetag

Xreal's first Android XR glasses will go on sale later this year, the company announced at the Augmented World Expo event in Long Beach, California. The frames, once called "Project Aura" and now just known as "Aura," are possibly the most ambitious take on what Google's homegrown AR platform can do.

As I previewed during Google I/O last month, Aura aims to provide performance similar to a high-end headset in a pair of relatively lightweight glasses (albeit ones that rely on a tethered connection to a separate puck.) At Google I/O, one of my top questions after demoing Aura was how much it's going to cost. Frustratingly, Xreal still isn't saying.

Despite AWE marking the glasses' "official" debut, the company hasn't shared a final price. Instead, it's opening up a two-week reservation period during which you can pay $99 to reserve a pair that will come with a $199 "launch credit." That will effectively save you $100 when it actually goes on sale. Just how good a deal that $100 savings is, of course, is impossible to say without a final price. Xreal is also offering a limited number of "founder priority pass" reservations that cost $299 in exchange for "guaranteed launch-day delivery" and special edition hardware.

Read More: https://www.engadget.com/2194861/xreal- ... -no-price/

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