The XR / Spatial Computing Magazine
Apple Vision Pro, AR, VR, and the interfaces and stories being built for spatial and mixed-reality computing.
Valve's Steam Frame launched Sept 14 at $1,059 (256GB) and $1,299 (1TB). Early reviews are unusually consistent: excellent comfort and eye-tracked foveated streaming, painful price, short battery life, and monochrome passthrough unless you pay about $150 more for a color camera.
Agog: The Immersive Media Institute has granted funding to sustain 8th Wall's transition to an independent, community-stewarded open-source project, targeting XR engine browser compatibility, the Studio editor, and documentation — the clearest sign yet that the March open-sourcing has real backing behind it.
After years of developer-only Spectacles, Snap is finally putting a price and a date on consumer AR glasses: $2,195, September 16, shipping this fall.
Magic Leap spent a decade trying to convince people to buy its own headset. It just decided the headset was never the valuable part.
Pimax built its reputation on ambitious specs and broken promises in roughly equal measure. Clearing its entire preorder backlog on schedule is the more interesting headline than the headsets themselves.
Valve can legally sell Steam Frame in the US now. Whether it ships before or after a looming Qualcomm price hike may end up deciding what it actually costs you.
Xreal's answer to a crowded, expensive AR-glasses market is a sub-brand that does one thing — mirror a screen, big — for a third of the price of its flagship. That's a bet worth watching.
The 2018 Tham Luang rescue is one of the most documented events of the decade, and almost none of that documentation conveys the space. A scanned VR reconstruction does — which is exactly why the studio kept the scoring system out of it.
Rather than porting a back catalogue into a headset, A.R. Rahman built for it: three Kathak performances fused with Western classical repertoire, remixed in Apple Spatial Audio, plus a Vision Pro re-edit of his Cannes XR film.
A text-to-image model gives you a picture. Marble gives you a place — a 3D world you can walk through, edit, and stitch to another. World Labs just made it available to anyone, and the money behind it is enormous.
Smart glasses could take photos and whisper directions, but you couldn't see anything. Meta's Ray-Ban Display glasses add an actual screen in the lens plus a wristband that reads subtle finger movements — everyday AR that finally has something to show you.
The keynote sold visionOS 27 as an M5 refresh. The actual beta reveals a bigger overhaul of how you address the system itself — which matters more for daily use than another chip generation.
Where visionOS asks you to build for one company's stack, Android XR is explicitly betting on standards you can already target. That's a real strategic difference, not just a spec sheet one.
Streaming instead of porting, Gaussian splats instead of manual modeling, and a spatial web that doesn't require the App Store at all. None of it made the keynote highlight reel.