An Italian tennis player has just won the Wimbledon tennis tournament for the first time in history. Now, as an Italian myself, I feel compelled to also do something that has never happened in history. If you have some good ideas, let me know in the comments!
For now, let me just do a thing that I’ve already done hundreds of times: a summary of the most relevant XR news of the week!
Top news of the week
XPANCEO becomes an XR Unicorn
XPANCEO, the Dubai-based company working on smart contact lenses, has just completed a round of investments worth $250M. Now the company is valued $1.35 billion, which means it can be considered a “unicorn” in the startup world.
The new funding round, led by Opportunity Venture, will allow the company to keep iterating its prototypes and hopefully release its first product to the market. Road To VR mentions a possible launch in 2026, but I personally think it is a bit too early.
I’m a big fan of smart contact lenses, so I’m happy to see that there are new investments happening in the field, after Mojo Vision shut down a few years ago. And I think XPANCEO deserved the trust from investors: the company remotely showed me its laboratory during an interview we had some time ago, and then managed to deliver various prototypes. Some of them were using hard lenses like Mojo Vision, but others were also made with a soft hydrogel lens, the type that many people wear every day. I have also been able to try a few of these prototypes when I was at AWE Europe, and they were working. This means that XPANCEO is a company that is able to deliver some results.
Now it’s time for XPANCEO to prove that it can build a product. Hopefully, this money will bring them to the commercialization stage, or at least close to it. I don’t expect a mainstream launch, but more something with limited features that may interest a niche market of people (e.g. a lens with glucose measurement for people with diabetes). I really hope they can deliver, because the smart contact lenses field is very fascinating.
For now, I can only compliment the amazing team at XPANCEO, starting from Roman Axelrod and Valentyn Volkov, and wish them good luck! I hope one day to travel to Dubai and visit the company in person!
More info (XPANCEO raises $250M — Bloomberg)
More info (XPANCEO raises $250M — Unite AI)
More info (XPANCEO raises $250M — Road To VR)
Other relevant news
The Upload VR Summer Showcase 2025 highlighted many XR indie games
As usual, Upload VR did a good job in creating an event to give visibility to many indie VR titles. The Upload VR Showcase Summer 2025 was a collection of many announcements related to small and medium XR games. As usual, there were no mindblowing announcements: usually, the big studios keep their announcements for bigger events like Gamescom or Meta Connect. Not to mention the fact that now there are multiple XR gaming showcases, so the pieces of news are scattered across all them. But still, even if there was no huge news, it was still a good event to showcase some VR and MR games and to give some visibility to indie studios.
The pieces of news announced are really too many to list them all for you, so I will link below a summary article about the showcase, plus a small list of my personal selection of the pieces of news I enjoyed the most:
- Elsewhere Electric, the co-op asymmetric game where a player on the phone and one in their VR headset have to solve various puzzles, has finally been given a release date. The game is coming to Quest and Steam on July 23
- Ndreams has released a new trailer for the much-awaited action-adventure game Reach. The trailer shows a bit of gameplay, and it is very cool to watch. Reach arrives on PS VR2, SteamVR, and Quest this year
- Virtual Skate allows you to control a skateboard in VR, with each one of your hands simulating the movement of one of the virtual feet. The game is expected to launch on August 21st
- Fixer Undercover is a quirky puzzle game coming to Steam and Quest early next year. It makes you enter a prison undercover as a maintenance worker, and you have to solve various puzzles (a la MacGyver) to go on with the adventure. It seems fun from the trailer
- How To God, the game clearly inspired by Black&White that lets you impersonate a (good or bad) god, is starting a Closed Beta round on July 21.
More info (Summary of all the news announced at the Upload Showcase)
More info (Elsewhere Electric)
More info (Reach)
More info (Virtual Skate)
More info (Fixer Undercover)
More info (How To God)
Samsung did not mention Moohan at Samsung Unpacked
Some time ago, the usual analysts had teased that Samsung would have officially launched the Project Moohan MR headset at the Samsung Unpacked in July. Then, they said it was not going to be a launch, but just a showcase with various demos. This week, the event happened, and the company strangely did not mention the headset at all during the event.
This reminds us that rumors and speculations have always to be taken with a grain of salt. Someone says that Samsung will have a dedicated event about it later on, and this seems very plausible to me, considering that the headset should be launched this year. And since Moohan has the Samsung branding, it should be launched at a Samsung event.
I’m honestly wondering if the company is still making some changes to the device. It was very weird that no one at AWE could try the headset, even if there was one actually available in a glass box. And I was not allowed to try it, even if later I traveled close to Google HQ. Now, Samsung doesn’t showcase the headset at its own event… this is a bit strange. I wonder if they suspended the public user showcases because they are applying some small changes to it… or they are just limiting the PR moments to build the hype in the best way possible…
News worth a mention
Meta invests $3.5B in Luxottica
Last year, there was a rumor, confirmed by Mark Zuckerberg himself, that Meta wanted to invest in EssilorLuxottica as a way to strengthen their partnership. This week, it actually happened: Meta invested $3.5B into the French-Italian company and got around 3% of shares. The plan is to grow this quota over the years and arrive at around 5%, which was the rumored amount. Thanks to this investment, Meta will be able to be a close partner to Luxottica (which has full control of the glasses market) and prevent its competitors from partnering with it.
Canon is working on an MR headset
Norman from /r/AugmentedReality went hands-on with the very expensive Canon mixed reality enterprise headset. I bet many of you have forgotten about it: Canon offers an enterprise headset with an insane price (like dozens of thousands of dollars). During the hands-on video, a Canon employee says that “we are now developing a consumer product”, admitting that they are working on some sort of mixed reality headset to be sold at an acceptable price (maybe a Vision Pro competitor?). We do not have further details about it, but I’m for sure intrigued by this leak.
Hands-on SINGRAY G2 headset
Last week, I told you that the Japanese company HMS announced a new enterprise-focused AR headset: the SINGRAY G2. Not many details were shared about this device. This week, Norman from /r/AugmentedReality shared a video of him going hands-on with the headset. The good news is that the headset exists and it works. The bad news is that from the video, it seems that the product is not as advanced as HoloLens 2 or Magic Leap 2.
Viture announces new glasses and new features
Viture is launching a new generation of its XR-ish glasses: the Luma Series, with the mission of letting you watch media content on a 152-inch virtual display. The flagship model of the generation includes The Beast, which features Sony’s latest micro-OLED panel and a 58-degree field of view. There is also a camera for shooting photos and videos and to provide a sort of 6DOF tracking, exactly like XREAL. Prices start at $399.
The company also announced a new feature that lets you convert all the media that you are watching in real time to 3D. So you can watch a movie on your PC, and thanks to some AI magic, you can see this movie on a big virtual screen, as if it were a native 3D movie. This is pretty cool.
More info (Viture Luma series)
More info (Viture 3D conversion)
Renders of the upcoming Ray-Ban Meta 3 allegedly leaked
On Chinese social media, a group is sharing a potential leak of the upcoming new models of Ray-Ban Meta glasses. The group claims that the new glasses, codenamed Aperol and Bellini, have enhanced AI features (like object recognition, to remind you where you left your keys) and extended battery life. This echoes other previous leaks. The differences between this leak and the previous ones are two: the first is that they are sharing alleged renders of the new glasses; the second is that they claim that Aperol and Bellini will be launched this year, and not next year.
This is interesting food for thought: on one side, if Meta announces these new Ray-Ban glasses now, together with the other non-Ray-Ban glasses codenamed Hypernova, it risks creating a big confusion during the launch. On the other side, with Google getting close to announcing its smartglasses and the competition ramping up, Meta may be willing to accelerate and launch the new advanced glasses as soon as possible. I guess we’ll discover the truth at Meta Connect.
A refresh of the Apple Vision Pro may launch this year
The rumors of a “refreshed” version of the Apple Vision Pro are intensifying, and when this happens, it usually means that the underlying news is true. This means that I’m getting convinced that a new, more powerful version of the Vision Pro is coming soon, this year or next one. The question is to understand exactly what product is going to launch and when… and here the rumors are all in disagreement.
The latest one by Mark Gurman states that this Vision Pro refresh may come this year, and not the next one as previously rumored, and will feature an M4 chip and not the still-not-announced M5. That’s ok… probably next week we’ll get another report saying the opposite…
CREAL announces a new investment close to $9M
CREAL is one of the most interesting startups in the XR field. The Swiss company is producing a lightfield display that can give you a true sense of depth and cancel the vergence-accommodation conflict. Over the years, it always proved to deliver and it managed to shrink its product from two huge boxes to very bulky glasses. At AWE, they showed their vision for creating two small modules to integrate into AR glasses. And now they just got $8.9 million of investment to reach that vision. I’m happy they got this money because this means they can continue working on the miniaturization of their product and hopefully in some years, I’ll be able to try some AR glasses using lightfields. Compliments to the whole team!
RealSense spun out of Intel
If you have been in the XR field for some years, you will surely remember the Intel RealSense tracking cameras: they were like small Kinects, able to track the upper part of your body. That technology went discontinued, and we all thought that Realsense was dead. But out of the blue, now, RealSense spun out from Intel as a new company with $50M of starting investment. Its mission is to “accelerate AI-powered vision for robotics and biometrics”. I’m pretty sure some technologies they’ll build will be suitable for XR as well…
More info (Realsense spun out from Intel — Linkedin announcement)
More info (Realsense spun out from Intel — RealSense blog)
The greatest VR LAN Party
The most viral news of the week on Reddit has been the huge VR LAN party organized by Jeff Baz, who is a guy making wooden chopsticks as a job, but with the side gig of organizing VR events. 130 headsets were playing at the same time in the same warehouse: it was definitely impressive. Standing ovation for this guy.
More info (Greatest VR LAN Party — Reddit Post 1)
More info (Greatest VR LAN Party — Reddit Post 2)
More info (Greatest VR LAN Party — Reddit Post 3)
A great smartglasses hackathon
Mentra, the startup working on an open operating system for smartglasses, organized a very big hackathon this weekend about its smartglasses. Many people were talking about it on X: it was good to see so much excitement about it. I can’t wait to see what solutions the community came up with…
More info (Mentra hackathon — X post 1)
More info (Mentra hackathon — X post 2)
More info (Mentra hackathon — X post 3)
Some news about content
- Table Troopers, the tactical mixed reality multiplayer game inspired by Worms, launches in early access on Quest on July 17
- “Grit and Valor — 1949” is getting VR support soon. The game’s real-time roguelite action will be brought to Quest, PSVR 2, and SteamVR headsets by nDreams
- BuildPort Xumia is a physics-driven space combat game giving you the ability to build out your own spaceships from scratch. Its regular price is $10, but it is currently available for $6
- Fun Train confirmed that BlackGate, its upcoming asymmetric multiplayer horror game, is now up for pre-order on Meta Quest. Public Early Access Beta should come around October 2nd
- Billie Eilish’s Birds of a Feather is the latest Beat Saber Shock Drop
More info (Table Troopers)
More info (Grit And Valor — 1949)
More info (BuildPort Xumia)
More info (Blackgate)
More info (Beat Saber)
Some reviews about content
- Prison Boss Prohibition is a hilarious sequel to the Prison Boss game. It is fun, it provides a sense of urgency, and it lets you play in co-op with your friends. But it has some tracking issues that should be improved.
More info (Prison Boss Prohibition)
Other news
ShapesXR added a very useful animation feature to give new life to XR prototypes
Apple acquired TrueMeeting startup to improve its Persona avatars
The Quest Navigator UI improved a lot by just removing its background
Don Hopper went hands-on with the StrikerVR Mavrik haptic gun
Zoom arrived on Quest. It is a 2D app that lets your colleagues see you as an avatar, so I don’t understand who should use it…
News from partners (and friends)
Preorder Iron Guard: Salvation!
Sharing the news that Iron Guard: Salvation, a first person, room-scale tower defense game built from the ground up for VR, is now available for pre-order on the Meta Horizon Store with a 17% discount for a limited time.
In Salvation, players step onto the frontlines to build and upgrade turrets, manage resources, and take down waves of enemies, all from a first-person perspective. Set across vibrant, war-torn worlds scattered throughout the galaxy, it’s a strategic, deeply immersive tower defense experience.
Learn more (The game is expected to launch in August)
Learn more (Official page on the Horizon Store where you can preorder the game)
Discover FM DUO camera!
Meet the FM DUO, a VR camera that is capable of filming up to 12K @30fps, and 8K @60fps. With built-in RTMP live streaming and 5G connectivity, the FM·DUO will immerse your viewers in real time! The FM·DUO features 2 full-frame CMOS sensors, with 6000 x 6000 pixels each. This allows for high-resolution zooming capabilities. Not only can you narrow in on one subject, but you can also focus on singular details of the subject’s facial expressions, clothing textures, and a multitude of other small details, enabling a much more immersive experience of VR video.
Some XR fun
This is how immersive motorcycling should really feel…
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
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- Immersive.international
- Nikk Mitchell and the great FXG team
- Jake Rubin
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- Mark G
- Simplex
- Gregory F Gorsuch
- Paul Shay
- Matias Nassi
And now here you are the link to donate:
Support The Red Cross in Ukraine
(Header image by XPANCEO)
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