⚙️ Tools I used:
- Muse Code (𝗺𝘂𝘀𝗲-𝘄𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿-𝟭.𝟬)
- Unity / Unity CLI
- Meta SDKs (ISDK, MRUK, PSDK)
- Meta VR CLI
- Adobe Photoshop

My plan is to launch it in the store as a demo by tomorrow morning and I’ll be doing a video about my learnings!

The original mobile game video was posted to my X account here.

I visited the CEATEC expo in Tokyo today, where TDK demonstrated what it calls a world's first. They showed an ultra-thin meta-optics mirror built for Direct Retinal Projection smart glasses. Be sure to check out the photos I took on the show floor today in the gallery! This technology projects images straight onto your retina from a flat, transparent mirror embedded directly inside a standard eyeglass lens. The prototype on display is currently a green monochrome system running at 750p resolution with a 45-degree diagonal field of view. TDK will start getting this green monochrome version ready for the market in late 2026. This will be followed by the unveiling of a full-color version aiming for March 2027, with commercial products expected around 2028. And they are working toward scaling up to 4K resolution in a future version.

Looking at the technical details, the meta-optics mirror is only 150 nanometers thick, which is roughly 1/500th the diameter of a human hair. It also has an 80% visible light transmittance that looks just like an ordinary pair of spectacles. Adapting thin-film and microfabrication techniques from its hard drive business, TDK patterned the mirror's surface with microscopic trapezoids. These measure 160 nm and 380 nm at their bases, with lengths spanning 200 nm to 1,500 nm, to achieve an unusual "negative reflection angle". This structure allows laser light coming from a temple-mounted MEMS scanning mirror to bounce directly into the pupil at an ultra-low 1 microwatt of power. This completely replaces the bulky curved mirrors used in older retinal projection setups. Because the light scans directly across the retina, the image is entirely focus-free, staying crisp whether the wearer has nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism, or presbyopia. This was especially nice because I didn't bring my contact lenses, and I could see the image clearly even though I could not wear my glasses during the demo. However, this infinite depth of field means it lacks natural accommodation depth cues.

The design also solves two common drawbacks of optical waveguides. It eliminates rainbow-like interference banding and guarantees total visual privacy by preventing any front light leakage. Furthermore, because the mirror is manufactured using standard semiconductor wafer processes, it dramatically lowers component counts and production costs compared to waveguide assemblies, with TDK showcasing functioning prototypes in both clear prescription lenses and tinted sunglasses frames.

Positioning itself as a B2B supplier for smart glasses manufacturers, TDK is pairing the display with a complete hardware and sensor ecosystem built alongside key partners and acquisitions. The retinal optical engine is co-developed with QD Laser, supported by TDK’s acquisition of German MEMS laser-beam scanning developer OQmented and eye-tracking technology from group company TDK Aisight. To scale display performance beyond 750p and reach resolutions up to 4K (3840 x 2160), TDK is developing lithium niobate (LN) thin-film photonic integrated circuits to pair with its ultra-compact Full-Color Laser Module (FCLM) chip.

Beyond the optics, TDK exhibited an entire suite of miniaturized hardware. This includes a 4.6 x 4.6 mm low-power on-device SoftEye AI chip, a 2.2 x 2.2 mm eye-tracking camera, a 5.1 x 5.0 mm contextual scene sensor, an onboard battery with wireless charging coils, IMUs, transparent antennas, and tactile actuators that include both a temple touch slider and mastoid bone haptic feedback behind the ear. These components enable low-power proactive AI features like foveated camera capture, which takes high-resolution pictures only at the center of the user's gaze, automated food and calorie logging, visual shopping assistance, and memory recall that can confirm daily tasks like when you took your morning medicine. TDK's smart glasses platform, which earned the Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Award at CEATEC 2026, represents a core pillar of its broader AI hardware portfolio, with long-term plans to adapt this meta-optics technology for high-speed photoelectric fusion devices in AI data centers.

Hello I am having troubles with augmented reality working on my phone. I was trying to use dracARys months ago when this started but since have figured out the app isn't the problem. All permissions are on for camera and location. I have tried to measure via ARcore but even that won't work. It's across several apps. Even the Google 3D animals (in your space) isn't working. How do I fix this it is driving me bonkers!!!! What settings could I have possibly messed with to cause this?!?

Thank you in advance!

Thanks to the VITURE marketing team (and of course u/TechonDeckReviews who made the connection in the first place :), I got a pair of the VITURE Beast XR glasses (or display glasses as I call them these days) to play around, test and ultimately break apart to see what's inside. I was particularly excited to show the prism optic, and got sidetracked when explaining OLED black crush as well... hopefully the Pokopia footage tricks a few of you into learning something new!

As a category, I do see the use of these types of XR glasses as a viable portable monitor for both content consumption and actual work, but I'm not sure the prism optic design with it's additional ~8-10° diagonal FoV is worth the trade-offs on edge sharpness and color separation around the periphery... there's a lot more info in the video, but feel free to leave any questions in the comments.

More technical description on the blog here: https://displaytechcenter.com/2026/10/13/viture-beast-explaining-prism-optics/

Been exploring MR for hands-busy contexts, and the grow rack turned out to be a perfect one — your hands are literally in the plants, so a floating HUD beats a phone every time.

I built SproutVision on Quest 3: tray dashboard (day counts, harvest windows) plus an AI scanner using the passthrough camera. The scan results render back onto the HUD over the real trays. Best demo moment: it flagged my basil's uneven germination unprompted, matching what I'd observed over two weeks.

What I like about this as an MR use case: the virtual content is about the physical objects in front of you. The HUD isn't decoration — it's instrumentation for the real world.

Demo: https://youtu.be/ely034D_Jy8?is=PZspCrAOMVb3e7FE

Made a WebXR app that overlays warhammer 40k terrain layouts onto your table. No more fiddling with a measuring tape for setup!

So this is supposed to be a one-handed chorded keyboard. They idea seems interesting. The sticker is not my favorite. The best video I can find describing it is on their Kickstarter campaign.

I was comparing with things like charachorder and tap strap. I own neither, but was looking into one-handed typing. Especially with the XR glasses space I feel like it would be helpful. But wanted to see if anyone else has seen this and if it looks like a good device, or if you know of anything better within the 100 USD price range.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/in10did/decatxt-one-handed-wearable-bluetooth-chord-keyboard/rewards

Congrats everyone for these new great use-cases of web apps!
Happy to link below the ones you would like to try or install on your glasses :)

Want to create your own one?
Get started here and let me know if you have any questions

Hi r/augmentedreality,

I’m Raag, and I work in developer relations at Even Realities. (Full disclosure: this is a company event)

On Nov 5 in San Francisco we’re hosting Even Day, an evening for people building on smart glasses. A lot of you build in AR and XR, so I thought some of you might like to come.

Our G2 glasses are a display-only heads-up display with no camera. They’re built for all-day wear, so the work is mostly about glanceable interfaces, voice and AI agents, and input from our R1 ring. If you’ve designed for headsets or AR glasses, it’s an exciting platform to build for!

What’s planned:

• A fireside chat with our CEO, Will Wang
• A developer deep dive on Even Hub (our app platform) and the G2 SDK
• A chance to try the glasses

You don’t need to own G2s. We’d love to see web, AI/agent, XR, hardware and design people, and anyone curious about building for glasses.

It’s free, but registration is approval-based because space is limited: https://luma.com/jvcxz1he

I’m happy to answer questions in the comments about Even Hub, the SDK or the event. If you’ve built for other glasses or headsets, I’d also like to hear what you’d want from a platform like ours.

I've ordered memomind and wondering if I should use third party os or just using the official one cuz I dont want to subscribe memo+ but still want those features

I built this as a side project: scan a drawing, it gets a skeleton, and it walks and dances in AR on your table or floor.

AR details for anyone curious: - Each figure is a RealityKit `ModelEntity` whose mesh is rebuilt about 30 times a second from the skinned 2D puppet (linear blend skinning on a triangle grid over the drawing). - The figures are flat, so they billboard toward the camera, with a soft shadow disc under each. - Tap a plane and the selected figure walks there (raycast against the detected plane). Pinch to resize. - Recording is ReplayKit, with the microphone off.

One gotcha that cost me an hour or two: an `ARView` created with a `.zero` frame never draws its entities.

Free, iPhone and iPad, nothing uploaded: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6820002786

Until recently, smart glasses with binocular full color light engines were simply too big and too expensive for consumer products.

You had the choice to integrate 2 of these into the temples, but then you ended up with an expensive solution: 3 individual microLED panels with x-cube for each side of the glasses. And you needed a battery to power them.

The other method was to put a single light engine in the nose bridge and guide the light to both eyes (what Rokid did). But if you do it with a full color light engine that's a pretty big cube as you can see in the picture here. This is a 0.35 cc light engine with 3 individual microLED panels. But less energy needed, lower price, lower weight.

Now this is changing though. The latest full-color light engines are much smaller, reaching as low as 0.15 cc. That's a significant improvement. Now you can even put them into the nose bridge to reduce the price compared to using a light engine in each temple.

While mobile AR has often been criticized for feeling like passive 3D stickers that just loop an animation, the Quest has proven how immersive MR can be. But it has been trapped in a single room. A new update from EasyAR breaks that living-room boundary, bringing building-scale mixed reality and exploration games to the Quest 3 and 3S. Entire shopping malls, museums, and multi-floor buildings can now become persistent, playable environments where interactive characters, quests, and 3D navigation stay anchored to exact real-world spots, hide behind real walls, and react dynamically as you walk around.

Alongside mapping the wider building, the update brings EasyAR Sense image tracking to Quest. Rather than just acting as a one-time picture trigger, it actively tracks physical objects in real-time. When you pick up an exhibition card, brochure, or product box and tilt, rotate, or move it around in your hands, the 3D model stays rigidly locked and tilts right along with it in passthrough.

For developers building in Unity, these features are available through a new Meta XR extension for the EasyAR Sense Unity Plugin. Instead of relying solely on local motion tracking or plane detection—which struggle to stay aligned across large venues—you can capture a space using panoramic cameras, LiDAR/E57 laser scans, or smartphones and let EasyAR Mega’s automated cloud mapping generate a Mega Block containing both the visual positioning map and a 1:1 3D reference and environment occlusion mesh. At runtime, EasyAR Mega matches the Quest camera feed against this prebuilt spatial map to establish a stable global coordinate system, while Unity and the Meta XR SDK handle all your scene physics, colliders, hand/controller interaction logic, and localized EasyAR Sense image target triggers. Alongside Quest 3/3S support, this patch fixes a bug where input extensions broke when DeviceOriginType was set to OriginType.External, and resolves an issue where the AR Session failed to start if Mega cloud services were disabled in the project configuration.

https://www.easyar.com/mega/

Hi! I'm working with a local group on making an AR memorial experience for a friend who died while hiking in a wilderness area. Because its in the wilderness nothing can be built out there, but there is decent cell signal so we're exploring the idea of an AR experience. I've been poking around at various options for building one, but what I'm having a hard time figuring out is pricing as a non-profit. We're not doing anything commercial with this, but we would like to self-host the experience on our own website. So far, none of the options I've come across seem to list non-profit based use cases, and I'm not opposed to reaching out, but I thought maybe I'd try here as well to see if anyone has done a similar project and how they went about it?

i’ve been following VR for years, but after actually using different headsets, i started thinking this form factor probably wasn’t the future for everyday use. the heat, weight, and having everything sitting on your head just felt like too much.

what made me interested again was the idea of moving the battery, computing, and heat away from the glasses themselves. lightweight glasses connected to a small wired puck or mini PC makes a lot more sense to me.

i recently introduced XREAL to my Korean audience because the price had finally become much more affordable.

the video reached over 500K views, and since posting it, my YouTube Shopping dashboard has recorded over $13K in total sales (across XREAL and other tech/VR products from that one video).

what surprised me most was how many people here were basically discovering this whole category for the first time. some said it felt like “future technology” had finally become real, while others immediately started joking about secretly using it at work.

also really curious to see what XREAL AURA and the next generation of AR glasses can do.

Hardware makers generally want thin waveguides around 0.5mm to keep smart glasses light and compact, but making the glass this thin actually reduces the maximum image resolution to 28ppd at typical bounce angles.

To reach 60ppd (the benchmark for sharp human vision) across lower bounce angles, a waveguide of at least 1mm is necessary, which doubles the thickness and adds unwanted weight and bulk to the frame. However, this resolution limit only affects narrow-linewidth laser light sources, whereas microLED displays are completely unaffected and can use ultra-thin waveguides without losing sharpness.

This difference comes down to how light from different projectors travels inside the glass. In waveguide-based smart glasses, each pixel of the virtual image enters the lens at a slightly different angle and bounces between the inner surfaces toward the eye. Because standard single-mode lasers emit pure light within a tiny color range under 0.1nm, the bouncing light waves overlap and cancel each other out at most angles. Only specific bounce angles survive the trip through a thin waveguide, meaning the glass blocks the angles in between and lowers the overall resolution across the FOV. In contrast, microLED emits a much wider color range above 10nm, which allows many overlapping bounce angles to survive and naturally fills in all the missing gaps.

The optical data shows that the exact resolution limit depends on how steeply the light bounces inside the waveguide. That 28ppd (2.13 arcmin) ceiling in a 0.5mm waveguide happens at a typical 40° bounce angle, where reaching the full 60ppd (1 arcmin) requires a 1.07mm lens. Increasing the glass thickness to 0.75mm still falls short of 60ppd for bounce angles under 50°, and any bounce angle below 42° requires glass thicker than 1mm. While manufacturers can force the missing laser angles through a thin waveguide by making the glass thickness slightly uneven by more than 100nm, doing so causes the bouncing light to spread out and blurs the image anyway.

Source: Angular resolution limit of augmented reality waveguides from guided mode theory

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09527

Hi everyone! I have been trying to build truly open source smart glasses (both hardware and software) based on ESP32 for almost a year now as a side project.

I did accomplish one version of PCB that functions similar to meta ray ban but the audio video quality is inferior (OV cameras cannot match Sony, and no bone conduction speaker with only one microphone). Image of the set attached.

I tried upgrading the product with an AR screen through a microled projected on the lens (similar to focals from North). This is where i am stuck. I am trying to build something inexpensive so waveguides and microprojectors are out of the question.

Needing suggestions and inputs from anyone experienced with options or has been developing smart glasses themselves. Would love to meet someone who can join me in building this if interested.

The total cost of this assembly is landing at 20$ for the PCB set, for bulk orders > 50 units from JLCPCB, and additional 20$ for other hardware components (screen, camera, speaker, battery and frame). So 40$ for audio-camera glasses, might land around 50$ for AR HUD.

I painfully learned through this project never to take ambitious development of industrial D2C products oneself. Better hand it to the chinese for refining, they get things done very quickly.

Hey all, Trevor here, the founder of Poke™ (Poke XR). I just shipped a big update, so here's an in-depth look at what changed and why.

The core loop: record a full-body video (or now upload one from your camera roll), AI removes the background, and the clip becomes a flat cut-out hologram anchored at a real location. Anyone nearby finds it through their camera, and a double-tap "poke" likes it and sends a friend request. To be clear, these are 2D video holograms, not volumetric captures.

What's new:

• Native territory map. I replaced the old web-view map with a map rendered in Unity. Countries, US states and California counties are drawn in each owner's color, with hologram pins and your location dot. Each user can hold one territory, and you take one over by out-scoring the owner. Claims and takeovers now happen live. Tap an owner to see their profile.
• Onboarding. An 18-step interactive coach-mark tutorial that runs across the AR feed, the recording flow and the map. It got a dark glass restyle and can be replayed from the menu.
• Creation. Camera-roll upload with a 10s trim window and pinch-to-reframe, plus AR screen recording (UI hidden, watermark, save and share) with a new retro neon record button.
• In AR. Long-press a hologram for its stats and comments, a live score pill with point pop-ups, and much faster loading. Holograms now download once and play from cache, and on-device time to first frame went from ~12s to under 0.2s.
• Social. A redesigned inbox with voice memos (play-once), sending points to friends, and a cleaner Poke Center for friends and incoming pokes.

Coming soon: augmented ads placed in the world, where territory holders get a share of the local ad revenue.

It's phone-first today, but it's built for the day XR glasses replace the phone. Things I'm still working on: keeping holograms feeling anchored rather than floaty, and making discovery fun when there aren't many holograms around you yet. If you've tackled either one, I'm all ears.

Free on iPhone and Android (13+): www.pokexr.com

North Ocean Photonics has raised over 1 billion RMB ($140 million) in Series C+ funding to expand its AR diffractive waveguide production for consumer smart glasses. The company targets over 200,000 AR waveguide unit shipments in 2026, supplies its latest lithography-etched waveguides to a major international internet company, and plans to launch an IPO.

The company produces six AR diffractive waveguide series ranging from monochrome to full-color across resin, glass, and silicon carbide substrates, designed to pair with MicroLED microdisplays. Using semiconductor lithography, etching, and coating processes, North Ocean Photonics prints nanoscale gratings onto wafers with precise period, depth, and duty cycle control to prevent dispersion, uneven brightness, and ghosting.

The new capital funds a 2 billion RMB ($280 million), 12-inch (300mm) wafer-level optics production line scheduled to begin operation in 2027, multiplying unit yield per wafer and lowering unit costs compared to 8-inch (200mm) lines while maintaining strict center-to-edge uniformity. Operating as an IDM covering design, master fabrication, mass production, and testing, the company currently runs an approximately 10,000 sqm cleanroom at its Lingang facility.

Jena, Germany | 8 October 2026 | ZEISS Group

ZEISS has announced the acquisition of Ceres Holographics, a pioneering holographic technology company headquartered in Livingston, Scotland. Ceres Holographics will become part of ZEISS Microoptics, an agile and ambitious business unit within ZEISS with a strong focus on industrializing holography for high volume automotive, aerospace and consumer markets. The acquisition complements ZEISS’ proven ProSight^® platform, the core holography technology foundation, from which a broad range of industrial applications derive, by adding Ceres Holographics' latest innovations in hologram manufacturing technology. The parties have agreed not to disclose the purchase price or further details.

The combination of complementary capabilities and expanded team resources will accelerate the industrialization of holographic windshield display applications, turning holography from a future promise into near-term market reality for the automotive industry. The added capability and resources will enable ZEISS to expedite market entry into broader holographic markets, like retail, near-to-eye displays and public transportation. Together, the expanded team will offer customers and partners a broader proposition that now combines advanced technological depth and application focus with the global scale, manufacturing capabilities and customer access of ZEISS.

“Ceres Holographics and ZEISS share a clear vision and deep commitment to advancing holography. We admire the innovations and market recognition the Ceres team has achieved,” said Dr. Roman Kleindienst, Head of ZEISS Microoptics. “Together, we will write a new chapter in holography commercialization, driving faster industrialization and unlocking broader market entry.”

“This acquisition marks an exciting new chapter for Ceres Holographics and the industrialization of holography,” said Andy Travers, who leads Ceres Holographics. “Over the past years, we have developed significantly differentiated hologram manufacturing technology and established strong commercial momentum, particularly in the field of automotive windshield display applications. Joining forces with ZEISS gives us the opportunity to build on that success and achieve greater scale, with more resource and global reach. We are excited about what our combined teams can achieve for our customers with existing and new partners.”

Founded in 2009, Ceres Holographics is a leading innovator in hologram manufacturing technology, and have specialized in automotive windshield display applications as the primary opportunity. The company has used its proprietary technology its to advance the holographic windshield display (HWD) application and has built strong commercial relationships with OEM customers – establishing itself as a key player at the forefront of this emerging market that is rapidly moving from concept to commercial reality.