Membership in ACM includes a subscription to Communications of the ACM (CACM), the computing industry's most trusted source for staying connected to the world of advanced computing. Once artificial intelligence is added to augmented and virtual reality devices, it could take the technology mainstream. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spent billions of dollars year after year to develop augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies, without much financial return to show for it. The company has spent north of $80 billion since 2014 on the technologies since acquiring Oculus, a VR hardware startup, including $20 billion in 2024 alone. In that time, it has lost billions on AR/VR, with products like its Quest headset consistently operating at a loss.

The glasses' sensor technology opens up new possibilities for research and development in augmented reality applications. Get ready for some amazing tech that's about to change the way we see the world, literally. Meta has just unveiled its latest creation, the Aria Gen 2 augmented reality (AR) glasses. But don't rush out to get them just yet. Aria Gen 2 is currently in research mode but is designed to push the boundaries of what's possible with AR and AI.

If 2024 was the year augmented reality glasses started to feel real, 2025 is already shaping up to be a really interesting year for AR, with a number of smaller companies showing off AR at CES 2025. Chinese company RayNeo brought their new X3 Pro AR frames to CES, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it seems to have squeezed an impressive amount of tech into a relatively small pair of frames. Like AR glasses from Meta and Snap, RayNeo use microLED projectors and waveguides to produce a full-color AR display. The field of view is just 25 degrees -- notably smaller than what Snap or Meta have in their products -- but it's impressively bright. Even under the fairly bright lights of a Las Vegas casino ballroom, I had no problem seeing the menus or even reading text (the display outputs 2,500 nits, according to the company).

It's been a while since I've tried a pair of personal cinema-style AR glasses given their propensity to be rubbish. The field of view is often too restrictive, they're often too low-res and they're often prone to giving me eyestrain headaches. But after I tried on Xreal's new One Pro glasses at CES 2025, I was suitably impressed as the company's latest addresses all of those gripes and plenty more. Xreal turned up in Las Vegas to show off the One Pro, which is a marginal improvement on the Xreal One that debuted, and quickly sold out, a month ago. Both pairs are equipped with the company's first in-house spatial computing chip, delivering less blur, no flicker and a 120Hz refresh rate.

Social interactions are fundamental to human life. The recent emergence of large language models (LLMs)-based virtual assistants has demonstrated their potential to revolutionize human interactions and lifestyles. However, existing assistive systems mainly provide reactive services to individual users, rather than offering in-situ assistance during live social interactions with conversational partners. In this study, we introduce SocialMind, the first LLM-based proactive AR social assistive system that provides users with in-situ social assistance. SocialMind employs human-like perception leveraging multi-modal sensors to extract both verbal and nonverbal cues, social factors, and implicit personas, incorporating these social cues into LLM reasoning for social suggestion generation. Additionally, SocialMind employs a multi-tier collaborative generation strategy and proactive update mechanism to display social suggestions on Augmented Reality (AR) glasses, ensuring that suggestions are timely provided to users without disrupting the natural flow of conversation. Evaluations on three public datasets and a user study with 20 participants show that SocialMind achieves 38.3% higher engagement compared to baselines, and 95% of participants are willing to use SocialMind in their live social interactions.

Stereo depth estimation is a fundamental component in augmented reality (AR) applications. Although AR applications require very low latency for their real-time applications, traditional depth estimation models often rely on time-consuming preprocessing steps such as rectification to achieve high accuracy. Also, non standard ML operator based algorithms such as cost volume also require significant latency, which is aggravated on compute resource-constrained mobile platforms. Therefore, we develop hardware-friendly alternatives to the costly cost volume and preprocessing and design two new models based on them, MultiHeadDepth and HomoDepth. Our approaches for cost volume is replacing it with a new group-pointwise convolution-based operator and approximation of consine similarity based on layernorm and dot product. For online stereo rectification (preprocessing), we introduce homograhy matrix prediction network with a rectification positional encoding (RPE), which delivers both low latency and robustness to unrectified images, which eliminates the needs for preprocessing. Our MultiHeadDepth, which includes optimized cost volume, provides 11.8-30.3% improvements in accuracy and 22.9-25.2% reduction in latency compared to a state-of-the-art depth estimation model for AR glasses from industry. Our HomoDepth, which includes optimized preprocessing (Homograhpy + RPE) upon MultiHeadDepth, can process unrectified images and reduce the end-to-end latency by 44.5%. We adopt a multi-task learning framework to handle misaligned stereo inputs on HomoDepth, which reduces theAbsRel error by 10.0-24.3%. The results demonstrate the efficacy of our approaches in achieving both high model performance with low latency, which makes a step forward toward practical depth estimation on future AR devices.

Amazon is reportedly developing smart glasses for its delivery drivers, according to sources who spoke to Reuters. These glasses are intended to cut "seconds" from each delivery because, well, productivity or whatever. Sources say that they are an extension of the pre-existing Echo Frames smart glasses and are known by the internal code Amelia. These seconds will be shaved off in a couple of ways. First of all, the glasses reportedly include an embedded display to guide delivery drivers around and within buildings.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented new augmented reality glasses at the company's annual developer conference on Wednesday, debuting a prototype of the next phase in its expansion into smart eyewear. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta AI will be able to talk in the voice of Dame Judi Dench. The glasses, named Orion, have the ability to project digital representations of media, people, games and communications onto the real world. Meta and Zuckerberg have framed the product as a step away from desktop computers and smartphone into eyewear that can perform similar tasks. "A lot of people have said this is the craziest technology they've ever seen," Zuckerberg boasted during his keynote speech, clad in a shirt that read "Aut Zuck aut nihil", Latin for "Either Zuck or nothing", substituting his own name into a motto coined by the Roman emperor Caesar.

In the past, the biggest AR/VR event of the year has been known alternately as Oculus Connect and then Facebook Connect. Much like last year, we can likely predict the biggest news coming out of Meta Connect 2024 with just two acronyms: AI and AR. Like every other big tech firm this year, Meta will be desperate to demonstrate how it plans to stay relevant in a future powered by AI. And now that we're seven months beyond the launch of Apple's Vision Pro, which arrived alongside a short-lived spike in interest in augmented reality (AR), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is likely eager to show off his own plans to make AR a reality. While Zuckerberg isn't as hot on the metaverse as he was when he renamed his company, the union of AI and AR is one way he can still make the dream of persistent virtual worlds come true.

It used to go by at least two different names -- Oculus Connect and then Facebook Connect -- but whatever the moniker, Meta's fall event is still a big showcase for the company's latest and greatest achievements in the virtual reality and mixed reality space. Much like last year, we can likely predict the biggest news coming out of Meta Connect 2024 with just two acronyms: AI and AR. Like every other big tech firm this year, Meta will be desperate to demonstrate how it plans to stay relevant in a future powered by AI. And now that we're seven months beyond the launch of Apple's Vision Pro, which arrived alongside a short-lived spike in interest in augmented reality (AR), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is likely eager to show off his own plans to make AR a reality. While Zuckerberg isn't as hot on the metaverse as he was when he renamed his company, the union of AI and AR is one way he can still make the dream of persistent virtual worlds come true.