XR Market Developments 2024
Kyle Cassidy
This section of the report highlights some of the most important tech industry developments in 2024. The first part is dedicated to an overview of trends and developments, including news from the major XR players (Meta, Apple, etc.,) and the second looks at smaller companies that are shaping the landscape.
Key Trends & Major XR Players
2024 saw much time and energy spent on trying to merge AR and VR – and then looking for a use-case for it. AR glasses were amongst the biggest trends with large companies like Meta and smaller ones like Xreal releasing competitive products. Additionally, the continued integration of AI into spatial computing was, and likely will remain, key as amongst other things, AI is used to fill in the spaces between data points, reducing data transmission times and file sizes.
AR Glasses
As everybody awaited Apple’s 2024 release of the Vision Pro, Xreal jumped into the news in CES 2024 announcing a pair of AR glasses that were significantly smaller and much cheaper than the Vision Pro’s $3,500. Xreal’s glasses looked to be something that people could actually wear. The Air 2 Ultras included cameras that allowed for positional tracking and a host of other true AR experiences.
Indeed, a glut of AR glasses were released in 2024 including RayNeo’s X2 and Air 3s, AdHawk’s Mindlink Air (marketed as “a fitness tracker for the brain”) and the Viture Pro XR. Snapchat also released their own AR glasses “Snapchat Spectacles” in September 2024, available to developers only for $100 a month with a one-year license. Unlike the Meta Ray Bans, the Spectacles ’24 has all its hardware in the glasses, which means there is no need for a cell phone connection. But the Spectacles ’24 are gigantic. And their battery life is less than an hour. Even Amazon jumped into the market with their Echo Frames, which weren’t actually AR glasses, but essentially an Alexa Bluetooth microphone and speakers mounted onto frames.
In addition, Meta opened a Ray-Ban pop-up shop to test the experiential retail space concept. However, within less than a year of Meta releasing their 2nd Generation Ray Ban Smart Glasses, two Harvard students had hacked them to do real-time facial recognition in a project called I-XRAY. They did this by directing the video stream from the glasses to a laptop running PimEyes, which provided the wearier with names and personal histories of the faces it recognized. Later, in 2025, we learned through investigative reporting by The Information that Meta had initially planned to incorporate facial recognition into its glasses but scrapped the plan amid privacy concerns. Yet, with looser regulation now, Meta has officially announced they plan to incorporate facial recognition in their glasses by 2026.
Apple
One of the biggest XR news items in 2024 was the long-awaited release of Apple’s Vision Pro. With a $3,500 price tag, the February 2024 release of the mixed reality or, ‘spatial computing’ (the term preferred by Apple) headset generated much hype. However, the ultimate demand for Apple’s Vision Pro was much less than anticipated, leading to a production cut in half to about 400,000 units. This led to industry speculations that mixed reality headsets, pancake lenses and micro OLED production will overall underperform in 2024. (These predictions largely panned out. While micro OLED markets still grew, it was mostly through non mixed-reality headset applications.)
In addition, Apple announced that it is making a 10-episode television show based on William Gibson’s 1984 classic sci-fi novel Neuromancer, much of which takes place in cyberspace (a term Gibson is credited to have coined). This novel is often recognized as a key piece of literature that has influenced XR development and design. Gibson himself saw his first VR demo in 2015 on a very modest Samsung Gear VR and was extremely impressed saying “wow, they did it!”. The Apple show could instigate more interest in XR in audiences that haven’t adopted the technology yet.
Meta
Meta released the Meta Quest 3S, which is a step back from the Meta Quest 3 model, with lower resolution and inferior lenses. This signals that market share is more important than technical advances, (a strategy Meta has had since their first steps into VR). Meta also released a software update that rendered some headsets permanently unusable. They sent out replacement headsets, but it’s concerning that hardware can be broken by a software update.
In 2024 Meta Reality Labs also hit record quarterly revenue but also record costs. During its Q4 2024 earnings call, Meta revealed that Reality Labs reached a record $1.08 billion in quarterly revenue and also had its biggest quarter in terms of costs at $6.05 billion, resulting in an overall quarterly loss of $4.97 billion. This just barely beats the division’s previous revenue record of $1.07 billion in Q4 2023, and significantly beats its largest quarter for costs of operation in Q4 2023 at $5.72 billion. Despite being an industry hardware leader, Meta’s reality lab has never turned a profit. Back in 2022 Zuckerberg told shareholders not to expect a profit until the 2030’s.
Lastly, Meta moved its “app lab” to the main screen, tripling the number of apps easily available on the Quest. Previously, apps that weren’t chosen by Meta for inclusion on their store got sent to a difficult-to-find hinterland called “the app lab” to lie in obscurity, un-browsable with no categories. Integrating the app lab into the main screen instantaneously added more than 2,000 new aps to the slightly more than 600 Meta had already chosen for inclusion in their store.
Microsoft
Microsoft pulled back some feelers and extended others. In 2024 they announced VR support for TEAMS via its MESH app. The Mesh app (debut back in 2021) lets corporations and users build their own environments. Mesh integrated directly into TEAMS, which means you can schedule and join VR meetings directly from your calendar. You can also view these meetings on flat screen.
At the same time, Microsoft is killing its mixed reality headsets. Microsoft announced it was shutting down the Hololens 2, with all support ending in 2027. Separately, they also announced that they’re spending 22 billion to make a military platform called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS). Palmer Lucky, the creator of the Oculus who has since switched to focus on military gear, bought in on it.
Google released an eagerly anticipated Android XR operating system, which supports all existing android flat apps. Called Android XR it is a full-blown version of the Android operating system that’s been adapted to run on XR headsets, and supports the entire existing library of flat Android apps. This opens the door to spatialized versions of those apps, as well as completely immersive VR content. Programing application and gaming environment Unity announced that it will support Android XR from day one. This means it will be easy to port existing Quest content for anything running Google’s android XR. Google also stated that Android apps currently on the Play Store will be available on immersive Android XR headsets by default, with developers able to opt-out if they choose. That means a huge library of existing flat apps will be available on the device on day one—great for giving the headset a baseline level of productivity.
Samsung
In 2024 Samsung announced that their new headset, codenamed Project Moohan, will be the first MR headset to launch with Android XR next year. The headset is expected to be able to do real time text translation and immersive maps, plus, it will have lenses that can “see” the environment around it and it will be able to remember past conversations. The prototype displayed in December of 2024 looked like a hybrid between the Meta Quest and the Apple Vision Pro with slimline pancake lenses.
Other Notable Companies & Developments
- Sandbox VR, the commercial VR gaming company announced a large expansion with almost 300 new locations for their full-body multi-player VR experiences. Sandbox is a location-based VR attraction that offers multi-player VR games for groups of people who share the same physical space with some real objects and some VR objects.
- Hewlett Packard and Google announced plans to promote their Project Starline video meeting system that uses multi-perspective capture, light field technology and a huge screen to do one on one 3D teleconferences. Starline uses both compression algorithms and AI to create a volumetric model of a person to get past the enormous amount of data necessary for real-time transmission of high resolution 3D video – all without headsets or glasses. (In 2025 Project Starline changed it’s name to Google Beam.)
- Blackmagic announced an 8k Apple Immersive Video camera, pre-orders available for $30,000. Called the URSA Cine Immersive, it has been designed to shoot 3D 180 footage specifically in Apple’s Immersive Video format. Also announced was that Blackmagic’s video editing software, DaVinci Resolve Studio would support Apple Immersive Video, which uses apples specific MV-HEVC format, dedicated spatial audio and 90 fps.
- Pimax followed Bigscreen VR in announcing a very flat, high-end headset desinged for extended PCVR use called the Dream Air and clocking in at $1,900. Bigscreen and Pimax are both gambling on high-end, high-resolution VR experiences attached to powerful gaming computers – a market which Meta has all but abandoned. Hedging their bets somewhat, the Pimax would offer standalone capability with an optional computer puck codenamed “Cobb” with a Snapdragon XR2 chip and battery.
- Sightful had announced and produced prototypes of an AR laptop “Spacetop g1” in May 2024, which featured no screen but a pair of XREAL AR glasses, cancelled the product in October before any models shipped to consumers. This is after Microsoft announced Copilot Plus PCs, which would have AI-optimized neural processing units, allowing Windows laptops to natively support AI with better performance than Spacetop could hope for with its more lightly powered Snapdragon processor.
- Varjo launched a “teleport” app service to easily scan places and bring them into VR to create gaussian splatted virtual twins. Priced as a subscription service at $30/month, it would take between 5 and 10 minutes to create a digital twin with using gaussian splatting. The subscription fee includes processing in the cloud and rendering on your device.
- Ford released a video showing how the 2024 Ranger was designed with a mixed reality headset it helps to “speed up the design process and reduce changes”. Ford is using Varjo’s XR headset, which is also being used by the US electric car company Rivian. Rivian claims to have saved a million dollars per vehicle program and that they’re able to build 2-3x times faster as a result.
- Vignetting (a reduction of an image’s brighness or saturation at the edges compared to the center) continues to be a stumbling block on virtual reality’s road to presence. While Meta has abandoned the pursuit of ultra-wide field of view (FOV) hardware, finding it to be not cost effective, there remain other companies who are dedicated to these developments. For example, Pimax and Sominum Space both released such headsets: the Sominum VR1, which started orders in June 2024, sports a 130° horizontal FOV and the Pimax Super Crytal, announced in April 2024 it has a horizontal FOV between 127° and 138° (compare this to compared to Meta Quest 3’ 110° FOV).