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The XR Week Peek (2025.05.21): Google teases its smartglasses, Valve Deckard gets an unexpected leak, and more!

Published 1 day ago8 minute read

Hello from Shenzhen, China! This is the last city of my Chinese trip, and together with some very interesting discussions I’m having with people here and some new great friends I’m making, I’m also enjoying a lot of Chinese food, since my B&B is in a part of the city full of small local restaurants. The fruit here in Southern China is also amazing: yesterday I tasted some mango with coconut milk, which was delicious.

  Anyway, I’m not here to talk about food (even if I would love to), but about XR, so let me tell you what the most interesting pieces of XR news of the past week have been!

  (PS Don’t miss the upcoming AWE Nite Florence that I am preparing together with Cecilia Lascialfari. The title is “PIONEERING THE FUTURE WITH XR AND SPATIAL INTELLIGENCE” and will feature three incredible speakers like Tom Emrich, Gabriele Romagnoli, and Alexandra Gerard! It will be live on
 Thursday, May 22nd at 6pm CEST/4pm UTC/9am PDT, for free, at this link. You can find more info on Cecilia’s website)

(Image by Google)

A few days ago, and yesterday it actually happened. What happened during the event was not a full launch, but (so the first teaser was just a teaser of the teaser in the end).

  which will be, of course,e powered by Android XR and by the artificial intelligence of Gemini. What is cool is that Google understood that the Ray-Ban Meta is selling so well because of the cool style and the distribution network of Luxottica, so it is trying a similar strategy by Google added that it will also work with Kering Eyewear, one of EssilorLuxottica’s main competitors, in the future. Yes, these brands pale if compared with the huge market power of Luxottica, butThis makes me very excited because I’m a big believer that if we want people to wear glasses all day, and so the alliance between tech brands and fashion brands is super important.

  Google also stated that it is . It is not clear if Samsung is also building a pair of glasses, too, though.

  Even if Samsung did not announce any glasses, we actually have the second Android XR device that has ever been announced. . The details on these glasses are thin, we have just a picture where it is possible to see two tracking cameras and one camera to capture images. We also know they have an optical-see-through display. next month (Chi Xu, if you are reading this post, book me for a demo!)

   (I will link them to you below). And Google has announcedso now developers can build even more powerful apps for the future Android devices (e.g. the latest SDK adds support for spatial videos). There are also rumors that

  Google also gave a newThe project has been , which, I guess, will try to sell this system to the various enterprise customers it serves. I personally think that among all the dead-on-arrival pieces of hardware, this is the most dead-on-arrival of them all: it’s a very expensive and bulky system, whoseConsidering that what I hope is to have the least calls possible, the last thing I want is an expensive, bulky piece of hardware just to see in 3D the belly of my colleagues with whom I’m forced to have a meeting. I mean, I think it’s an impressive tech gadget and I would really love to try it, but I would never buy it for my company (unless my company sold products for the belly, in that case it would be really useful…)










(Image by Valve)

In an incredible plot twist that no one was expecting,

  Stan, who we can refer from now as SadlyItsStanly, has probably learned about Valve’s plan since his headset has common suppliers with Valve’s headset. He doesn’t want to leak the full design, because as a headset manufacturer himself, he wouldn’t like this to happen to his device, but he still teased that He also said that notwithstanding previous rumors that talked about a release this year.

  I know Stan, and he already gave me in the past a few heads-up on things that would happen and almost all of them became true, so i. I also hope he makes more reveals in the future. If he said that Valve Deckard exists and it is a great headset, we have to believe it. And this is great news for all our ecosystem…


In Japan, Chinese manufacturer XREAL announced the launch of an accessory called Preorders have opened in some regions like Japan, and the company plans to launch it in the other countries where Xreal One is sold in late June,

  This is very interesting: for just $100, you can get an accessory that,t first of all, that you use for productivity. And especially, allowing these glasses to become truly augmented reality glasses. Since the tracking is performed with only one camera, it can’t work as well as the one made with multiple cameras that is performed on other headsets, but

   which will now support the XR Interaction Toolkit and allow better hand tracking and


(Image by Meta)

As usual, Boz has been the face and voice of the company related to some interesting topics. First of all, he stated thatThen he said that Meta is taking action to causing framerate issues in the latest updates, especially with a weird battery-saving feature that brought all the apps straight to 45FPS. He says that notwithstanding the usual mess with the updates, Meta will keep iterating fast the Quest runtime.



, probably in the upcoming VisionOS 3. First of all, it will be possible to. Then Apple is opening up. Apple Vision Pro will also add later this year, starting with Synchron’s. This will allow, for instance, people with ALS to click on buttons just by thinking about clicking on them.

  According to Mark Gurman, in Vision OS 3,



Meta is working on accessibility features, too, and this week it has announced that of what they see in front of them so that to help blind people discover what is in the space they are in., which lets blind and low-vision Ray-Ban Meta glasses wearers start a view-sharing video call with one of the service’s 8 million volunteers who help them navigate a situation. It is very good to see Meta works with accessibility.

and includes some people with long expertise in the industry. The details on their glasses are thin, but the company is making clear that it is where AR glasses already have valuable use cases, like the They seem to focus a lot on quality, so I’m curious to see what they will come up with.

within its social VR platform. The company is not going to prevent the existing mechanisms that people are using to sell and buy avatars, but it is adding the marketplace asThe Avatar Marketplace is also now such as ‘Quill’ from Polyarc’s VR adventure series Moss.

  This is a good thing to allow creators to earn money doing the work they love on VRChat.

The first-person MOBA offers up large 5v5 battles, letting you choose from nine unique heroes, each with their own weapons, skills, and playstyles. , and the team acknowledged there is still a lot to do, but it would like to grow the game together with the community.

  I was supposed to mention this news in the “Friends” section since I know Alex, the PR of the team, but actually this game was received so well on Reddit and on all the online magazines (), that I thought it deserved a mention on its own in the “News” section. It seems that the team has the right attitude to build a great game powered by a big community… let’s hope that it will actually deliver!



Almost everyone now is making a VR games showcase, probably I’m the only one not hosting it. So this week These are the most relevant pieces of news announced:




















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A new way of shooting
Funny link

I thought it was only me!
Funny link

Google I/O bingo card. Actually I would say, the bingo card of all the tech events now.
Funny link

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:

And now here you are the link to donate:

Support The Red Cross in Ukraine

(Header image by XREAL)


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