The Next Generation of XR Hardware: What to Expect in 2025/2026

In terms of tech, the world is a changed place, but that doesn’t mean that it’s bad. It wasn’t that long ago we were looking forward to new and fairly uninspiring iterations of VR – soon to become XR – headsets from a raft of manufacturers, each promising better graphics, faster chips, enhanced connectivity, and immersive environments to use on them. Now, that all seems to have been thrown up in the air with the advent of Smart Glasses and everyday AI-driven AR devices. Recent technology roadmaps seem to have been abandoned as designers vie for a slice of this new and valuable market.

The market for VR and AR headsets and Smart Glasses was hotting up, and both big and small companies are still keen to develop new hardware and get in on this highly lucrative sector; it just might be different tech from what they imagined a couple of years back. It’s true that the market is pretty much split between those developing headsets and those more focused on AR glasses, and both sectors are likely to be well catered for in the next year to 18months. In this article, we’ll look at what to expect from the market and how XR – and AI – is going to change what we buy in the next few months. 

Mobile Connectivity is Key

From its start point as VR headsets just a couple of years ago, XR has grown at an astonishing rate. XR is quickly becoming the most popular technology, and within the next ten years, this kind of technology is likely to replace mobile phones and tablets as the primary gateway to the digital domain. This shift will occur in a manner that is comparable to how mobile phones have largely supplanted personal computers in the majority of use cases. The power and technology of high-end mobile phones is at least as good as most PC’s, and they are far more portable.  In the same way, mobile phones are, to the greater extent, likely to lose out to the next generation of XR headsets and Smart Glasses.  

With the latest crop of headsets and glasses having sufficient processing power and onboard connectivity, they will very soon be able to do many of the things that we rely on our mobile devices for, and some of them will be done much better. 

What the Market Will Look Like

We know that there are several major developments underway, but are less clear on when they are actually going to hit the commercial market. Such is the value of the market, any developmental company is going to keep its hand very close to its chest, so rather than firm details on launch dates, we tend to have rumours, but rumours with quite a lot of flesh on them. Let’s have a look at what we expect to be released over the next few months.

Apple Vision Pro 2. Having first dipped their toes in the XR headset market with the technologically wonderful but commercially disastrous Vision Pro, Apple seemed to have learned important lessons about cost against value. At $3,499 the Vision Pro was wildly off being a marketing success, even though it had some great features, and it’s believed that Apple will aim to make the Vision 2 a lower priced device in order to compete, however, it seems that the Los Altos company are going to take their headset in a different direction.  

Market rumours are that the Vision Pro 2 will be able to be hard-connected to a Mac to enhance the user experience via both devices. Mooted to be using the powerful M5 chip rather than the previous units M2 hardware, Apple see this new product as being an ultra-low latency augmentation of the Mac system in place of the AR glasses that they were initially developing for this function. It would allow streaming of content from the Mac and act as an AR interface.  

According to internet rumours the Vision Pro package is intended for serious users rather than casual gamers, and the point of the Mac connection and ultra-low latency is that it could be used in surgical simulations, where lag could be fatal. Details are pretty sketchy and we are not expecting to see anything solid until late in 2026.

There are also rumours that Apple are developing a lite version of the Vision Pro, which will be cheaper to own while offering comparable performance. It’s suggested that the Apple Vision Pro 2 Lite will perform similarly to its predecessor but at a lower cost, with figures around $2000 being quoted. It’s suggested that this new addition to the Apple XR ecosystem will carefully weigh capability against cost in an effort to broaden the company’s appeal. Apple has a difficult time upholding its reputation for producing high-quality computers at a competitive price, particularly as you could buy several Meta Quest 3’s – and possibly Meta quest 4’s – for that money.  

XREAL One Pro. The XREAL One glasses were well received by both the technical press and the buying public when they launched earlier this year. The AR glasses boasted an impressive full-HD 120Hz OLED image with vivid colours, impressive contrast, and a 600-nit brightness, but also solid audio courtesy of Bose. They were difficult to fault, but XREAL didn’t leave it there and have developed the One Pro glasses with advances on the original tech, though in reality, that boils down to an upgraded display. 

The XREAL One glasses couldn’t match the amazing visual quality of the new Sony Micro-OLED display with a smaller prism optic, which truly brings the spatial capabilities of that X1 chip into focus on the One Pro’s. The simulated 32:9 ultrawide display with the expanded 57-degree field of view (FOV) fitted to the One Pro’s is supposed to be an incredible experience, but possibly not worth the extra £120 that they are retailing for. Given that these are still sporting similar specifications to the previous glasses, that may be a bit of an ask.

Of course, one of the most anticipated headsets that is likely to become available in the next few months is the rumoured Meta Quest 4, which they have dubbed Prismo Low (a standard design) and Prismo High (a premium design).  There is lots of hearsay out there regarding specifications and possible features, and it’s difficult to know what to believe, but the possible launch date of the end of 2026 to the beginning of 2027 seems credible. Meta is now well versed at developing these kinds of products and led the low-cost VR/AR market with the Quest 2/3. But it’s now a different world and just offering a slight upgrade on the Quest 3 wouldn’t cut it. We expect the Prismo to be a significant improvement on the current tech offered by Meta.

But Meta have also found a lucrative product stream in Smart Glasses and it is unlikely that their development team will want to miss out on what is becoming a huge market. But there are reports from both the Wall Street Journal and UpLoad VR that the company is now going to concentrate on the development of an ultra-light headset that is a larger and more powerful version of the Ray-Ban glasses with XR capabilities similar to the Apple Vision Pro, but significantly cheaper. Unlike the current Meta Smart Glasses which require connection to a mobile device to access AI features, Project Puffin is likely to have its own computing power in the form of an intelligent ‘puck’ which will allow for many of the required computing functions including the main processor, Wi-Fi, and solid-state memory. Meta is supposedly experimenting with eye tracking rather than having physical controllers, which will make the whole package much simpler and easier to use. 

While Meta may seem dominant in the XR market, we certainly shouldn’t dismiss the latest from RayNeo, and Valve, all of whom have good experience in this kind of hardware.  

The RayNeo X3 Pro Smart Glasses are huge on specs but equally huge on physical dimensions, though not as heavy as you may suspect, coming in at around 80 grams. This is serious hardware. The micro-LED waveguide screens are very bright at around 2,500 nits, and the colours are pretty true to life. The UI is easy to use and can be navigated by voice or a touchpad accessed via the stem. The Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chipset inside enables a number of cool multimodal AR and AI functions. For example, it lets you navigate the whole system with just your voice and even beats the Ray-Ban meta specifications by translating both voice and text in an image in real time. They might not be the best-known brand but we predict that RayNeo are going to be big in this complex marketplace. The only thing that we are not sure about is the potentially low battery life.

Back onto dedicated XR headsets and the Valve Index 2 is one of the most anticipated products out there. Now code-named ‘Deckard’ the rumours are that it will hit the shops at the end of the year, possibly in time for a Christmas launch. The original Valve Index debuted in 2019 and made great waves then, so Valve have had plenty of time to look at what is good and bad with the opposition and develop from there. Many of the latest rumours about the Valve Index 2 suggest that it will have improved mini-LED technology capable of producing spectacular visual quality. Furthermore, the mini-LED technology has the potential for superior colour reproduction. These factors are not just vital for immersion. Increased visual clarity also aids users in avoiding visual fatigue after prolonged VR headset use. There’ll be more information on this highly anticipated headset here, when we get it.

Many will know that the Rokid Max Smart Glasses are already here and we love ‘em, but the company officially launched their AR glasses at the Rokid Expo 25, in May 2025. Weighing just 49 grams, and with an AI-driven 12Mp camera, these offer razor-sharp images with intelligent object identification and clarity. With 1,000 nits of brightness on the display, making screen content exceptionally clear, even on the brightest days.  

The real cherry on the cake though is the real-time captioning technology for instantaneous translation. From multilingual communication in international meetings to ordinary conversations when travelling abroad, it immediately converts speech into text that is displayed in front of the user’s eyes, providing smooth and seamless cross-linguistic contact. This feature can also be used to provide immediate prompts to aid public speaking.

Finally, we also have the OPTIX 50 AR Waveguide module to look forward to. An AR waveguide module is a slender, transparent element in Augmented Reality eyewear that directs light from a projector to the user’s eye, integrating digital content with the physical environment in a lightweight, compact design. These employ total internal reflection to confine and guide light, bringing virtual images into the user’s visual field without hindering their perception of the physical surroundings. These modules are essential for developing transparent, see-through augmented reality experiences, rendering AR devices more ergonomic and less cumbersome than previous technologies. Suffice to say, waveguide modules are very important to XR displays, and the OPTIC 50 AR guides are exciting. 

The EPIC 50 AR waveguide module is a significant innovation from OPTIX that will help allow the next generation of AR devices. It meets major needs for more advanced and capable consumer AR glasses by combining a broad field of view and high display performance. The module’s production readiness and great efficiency are critical milestones towards bringing mass-market smart eyewear to life. 

This 2D geometric waveguide module is intended for mass-market AR glasses, providing a 50-degree field of vision (FoV) with high efficiency and full-colour display. This new module has higher display performance, with a peak brightness of 7,000 nits, and is designed to enable AI-powered AR products. The module is intended for lightweight AR glasses, improving visual clarity and contributing to the future of consumer AR.

 

From a state where we were expecting the major manufacturers to just churn out iterations of their products for the next few years, we have suddenly entered a market that is blooming with new and exciting products that are going to make XR and AI driven content relevant to everyone. This means, by extension, that there is far more opportunity to develop Apps and games to match them. If you have an idea for an App or game that you need help with, contact us and let our expert team make it a reality.