Plus: Meta plans to add face recognition to its smart glasses, Jared Kushner named as part of whistleblower's mysterious national security complaint, and more. The widespread protests in Iran have exposed both Tehran's brutal tactics in the streets, where state authorities have killed thousands of demonstrators since early January, and extreme measures to block access to the global internet. As it has done repeatedly in the past, the Iranian regime cut off the country's residents from the global internet during the latest anti-government uprising. But it also shut down access to the country's intranet, known as the National Information Network, which new research found is becoming a mechanism of constant and pervasive surveillance that may ultimately be the only way Iranians can get online. The last remaining major nuclear weapons treaty between the United States and Russia just expired.

Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2026 is Feb. 25 Valve's Steam Machine: Everything we know The controversial technology could roll out as soon as this year. Meta has backed away from highly controversial facial recognition tech in its products and services before, but seemingly not so far that it isn't willing to have another crack at it. A new report from claims Mark Zuckerberg's company wants to add facial recognition to its lineup of branded smart glasses at some point this year. The spoke to four anonymous people with knowledge of Meta's plans, who told the publication that the feature is codenamed Name Tag internally. As you'd expect, it would let people wearing Meta-powered Oakley or Ray-Ban glasses identify people and get information about them using AI.

Google's Smart Glasses Will Have the Best Software. But They'll Have to Win on Style Too When Google releases its smart glasses in the coming months, the strength of its AI-powered software will be its biggest leg up on its rivals. But will people want to be seen wearing them? When Google ships its newly refreshed smart glasses this year--as the rumor mill is predicting, and as the hands-on demos posted just last week have all but confirmed it will--the company's tech will be joining a crowded field. But whether this rebirth of Glass will pop or fizzle comes down to whether Google can best its main competitor: Meta .

Bungie's Marathon arrives on March 5 How to claim Verizon's $20 outage credit Apple needs a better Siri, not an unproven wearable. So it's come to this: Apple is reportedly working on a wearable AI pin . According to, it is going to be a small device with multiple cameras, a speaker, microphones and wireless charging. It sounds like the perfect gadget to pair with the long-awaited AI-powered Siri update, which will also reportedly work as a chatbot . But while many Apple rumors conjure up an air of excitement, the notion of an Apple AI pin sounds downright baffling. Worse, it just seems desperate.

At CES 2026, Everything Is AI. Integrated chatbots and built-in machine intelligence are no longer standout features in consumer tech. If companies want to win in the AI era, they've got to hone the user experience. The New Year's Eve champagne isn't even warm yet, and CES week is already upon us. The giant annual celebration of consumer tech kicks off the first full week of January as companies across the world convene in Las Vegas to hawk their latest innovations.

Google plans to launch smart glasses powered by artificial intelligence (AI) in 2026, after its previous high-profile attempt to enter the market ended in failure. The tech giant set expectations high in 2013 when it unveiled Google Glass, billed by some as the future of technology despite its odd appearance with a bulky screen positioned above the right eye. Google pulled the product in 2015 less than seven months after its UK release, but is now planning on re-entering the market with smart glasses with a cleaner look. But it comes after Meta has already made waves with its smart specs, which have sold two million pairs as of February. Google's new tech will let users interact with its own AI products, such as its chatbot Gemini.

Here's how Google is laying the foundation for our mixed reality future At The Android Show: XR Edition, the company showed off some major updates headed to what could be its next big OS. Here are two of Google's reference model smart glasses. The one in the front features dual RGB waveguide displays while the one in the back relies on a single monocular screen. Today, during the XR edition of The Android Show, Google showed off a bunch of updates and new features headed to its mixed reality OS. And while most of the news was aimed at developers, I got a chance to demo some of the platform's expanded capabilities on a range of hardware including Samsung's Galaxy XR headset, two different reference designs and an early version of Xreal's Project Aura smart glasses and I came away rather impressed.

The companies, products and trends that fared the best over the last 12 months. Every December, the Engadget staff compiles a list of the year's biggest winners . We scour over articles from the previous 12 months to determine the people, companies, products and trends that made the most impact over the course of the year. Not all of that influence is positive, however, and some selections may also appear on our list of biggest losers. Still, sit back and enjoy our picks for the biggest winners of 2025.

Meta wants to make its AI hardware slicker and more fashion-forward. It also needs to make its software more usable. The way to do all that appears to be hiring design maestros away from Apple. Meta has made a big move to hire two prominent designers away from rival tech giant Apple, likely putting them to work on designing Meta's next generation of AI hardware and the software that runs on it. Alan Dye, formerly Apple's vice president of Human Interface Design, will join Meta to head up a new design studio within Meta's Reality Labs.

Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) operate in high-pressure environments, making rapid, life-critical decisions under heavy cognitive and operational loads. We present EMSGlass, a smart-glasses system powered by EMSNet, the first multimodal multitask model for Emergency Medical Services (EMS), and EMSServe, a low-latency multimodal serving framework tailored to EMS scenarios. EMSNet integrates text, vital signs, and scene images to construct a unified real-time understanding of EMS incidents. Trained on real-world multimodal EMS datasets, EMSNet simultaneously supports up to five critical EMS tasks with superior accuracy compared to state-of-the-art unimodal baselines. Built on top of PyTorch, EMSServe introduces a modality-aware model splitter and a feature caching mechanism, achieving adaptive and efficient inference across heterogeneous hardware while addressing the challenge of asynchronous modality arrival in the field. By optimizing multimodal inference execution in EMS scenarios, EMSServe achieves 1.9x -- 11.7x speedup over direct PyTorch multimodal inference. A user study evaluation with six professional EMTs demonstrates that EMSGlass enhances real-time situational awareness, decision-making speed, and operational efficiency through intuitive on-glass interaction. In addition, qualitative insights from the user study provide actionable directions for extending EMSGlass toward next-generation AI-enabled EMS systems, bridging multimodal intelligence with real-world emergency response workflows.