‘MemoMind One’ Display Smart Glasses Blast Past $500K Crowdfunding Mark

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MemoMind, a new AI hardware brand from projector manufacturer XGIMI, launched a crowdfunding campaign for its first smart glasses last week, the MemoMind One, which include dual displays, microphones, and open ear speakers—but no built-in camera.

The News

First shown at CES 2026 in Las Vegas in January, MemoMind One launched a Kickstarter last Sunday hoping to attract a nominal $80,000 HKD (~$10,100 USD) for its first pair of smart glasses, which serve up dual green micro-LED displays (2,000 nits), integrated audio, and a host of AI-assisted actions, such as real-time translation, note taking, contextual assistance, navigation, and more.

At the time of this writing, MemoMind One’s Kickstarter has already blasted past the $500,000 USD mark, now approaching $4.6M HKD (~$586,000 USD).

MemoMind One (Nomad) | Courtesy XGIMI

MemoMind One (Archive) | Courtesy XGIMI

MemoMind One (Gotham) | Courtesy XGIMI

The China-based company, which is best known for its range of home projectors, is offering MemoMind One in three frame styles: Nomad (Square-Round), Archive (Round), and Gotham (Square), and promises seven customizable color options. They also support prescription lenses, as XGIMI aims to deliver all-day usage with its “up to 16 hour” battery life.

While MemoMind One includes a range of AI-powered features without needing a subscription, such as on-device AI assistant, navigation, translating more than 26 languages, and displaying teleprompter text, the company is also set to offer a monthly ‘Memo+’ subscription service priced at $20 USD per month.

Real-time translation on MemoMind One | Courtesy XGIMI

The Memo+ subscription is set to include a longer-term memory that can search across your captured meetings, conversations, and moments. Notably, deposit holders will get 12 months of Memo+ for free while Kickstarter backers get six months.

MemoMind One is available to pre-order through Kickstarter, with shipments expected later this summer. Pricing starts at $400 for the Standard Edition, rising to $499 with prescription lenses. A Custom Edition starts at $449.

My Take

Meta and hardware partner EssilorLuxottica have been pretty vocal about the success of their camera-clad Ray-Ban smart glasses over the years. The growing segment has shown that there’s definitely a market out there for people who want stylish glasses that put AI front and center, and also pack in a pretty okay camera and pair of built-in headphones too.

For some, the camera is a bit of a sticking point though, as it understandably can weird people out at the thought of being constantly recorded, or being misidentified as that guy—the one who followed the YouTube tutorial on how to disable the capture LED so people know when you’re actively recording. That said, if Meta’s, Google’s or Samsung’s continued investment in the space is any indication, the weird guy phenomenon hasn’t poisoned the well just yet, as there seems to be enough good will out there to not elevate things to “Glasshole” levels of moral panic.

While not the first to offer dual displays (albeit monochrome green), MemoMind One seems to be flanking the smart glasses segment from a decidedly much safer approach, one that’s critically without any whiff of controversy thus far. And in the process, it’s also looking to undercut some of the display smart glasses market leaders too, like Even Realities G2, which are priced at $600 before adding prescription lenses.

We haven’t gone hands-on with MemoMind One yet, although it’s interesting to see that consumers will soon be able to choose between display-clad smart glasses and audio-only smart glasses for more of less the same price.

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Sony: The Countdown Begins on PSVR 2 & PS5 Physical Discs

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Sony today announced it’s starting the clock on the production of physical discs, as the company is set to adopt a full digital marketplace at the start of 2028.

All new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028, Sony revealed in a blog post, putting an end to an over three decade-long tradition starting with the 1994 release of the original PlayStation.

Sony notes that while you’ll still be able to buy games at third-party retailers, these will be offered in digital formats only. It also won’t affect games scheduled to release in physical formats prior to the January 2028 cutoff, the company says.

“This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” Sony maintains. “This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.”

Although PSVR 2 has been essentially neglected by Sony shortly after its 2023 launch, the headset still gets a steady stream of both digital and physical disc releases, with the most recent of which being I, Robot, which released by Strictly Limited Games in April 2026.

Notably, producers like Strictly Limited Games, Limited Run Games, and Perp Games released many of the physical editions for PSVR 2, making for around 72 games released in total according to a Reddit thread dedicated to tracking physical releases. This comes in contrast to PS5’s over 1,000 physical discs released since its initial release in 2020.

This follows Rockstar Games’ decision to forgo a physical disc release for the highly-anticipated GTA VI, which is set to arrive this November on the PlayStation Store and in stores as an empty ‘collectors edition’ disc case with supplied digital download code.

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Quest’s Most Popular Game ‘Gorilla Tag’ is Going Mobile in ‘Monke Mayhem’ Next Year

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Another Axiom announced Gorilla Tag, Quest’s most popular game, is coming to mobile devices in a standalone game, titled Gorilla Tag: Monke Mayhem.

The free-to-play sandbox game is slated to land on iOS and Android devices sometime next year, with other platforms planned to be announced at a later date. As it is, it seems the studio is keeping the original version exclusive to VR headsets.

Another Axiom says it’s still in deep development of the mobile title, although broad testing is expected to come in the near future. In the meantime, the studio showed off a work-in-progress version at GorillaCon 2026, which took place during VidCon last week.

For now, the studio says instances will support up to 50 players, although in the past the company has experimented with server architectures that have allowed them to support up to 75 players in its sci-fi sports follow-up Orion Drift.

As one of the most-downloaded Quest games several years in a row since its 2021 early access release, the arm-swinging game of monkey tag has a very good chance of appealing to its core audience—essentially teens and pre-teens—and more importantly taking the game’s revenue to new heights.

Granted, the mobile version will lose Gorilla Tag’s infectious locomotion method, as users instead rely on on-screen UI, although it’s clear word of mouth has gotten around the playground. Another Axiom hasn’t shared any recent figures since it first announced the game had topped $100 million revenue in mid-2024, which the studio said included around 3 million monthly active users.

Notably, this follows a recent trend of VR developers looking towards flatscreen users to boost engagement, with notable VR-to-flatscreen offerings including Vertigo Games’ Arizona Sunshine, Polyarc Games Moss, and Meta’s own social VR platform Horizon Worlds focusing on mobile moving forward.

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Elon Musk’s Brain-chip Startup Aims for Scalability with New Transdural Procedure

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Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface (BCI) startup Neuralink announced the company has successfully performed its first transdural brain implant surgery, which promises to increase scalability while significantly reducing surgical trauma.

The News

In a new video (seen below), Neuralink reveals it has implanted electrode threads through the dura—the brain’s thick, leather-like membrane that sits just below the skull—without cutting or removing it like in the company’s previous human clinical trials.

The procedure was carried out in May 2026 during a clinical trial at University Health Network’s Toronto Western Hospital, which is intended to make implantation safer, less invasive, and faster, the company says.

To do this, Neuralink redesigned its insertion needle to better penetrate the dura, which can be over 10 times thicker than the company’s electrode threads, which are thinner than a human hair. The key issue though is the brain beneath is constantly moving, and the dura obscures a dangerous network of blood vessels that need to be avoided.

Neuralink also developed synthetic dura models for extensive testing, allowing researchers to test new imaging systems to better view the brain below the dura.

As seen in the video, Neuralink’s new technique uses indocyanine green (ICG) video angiography, an imaging technique that uses a fluorescent dye to visualize blood flow in real-time, and optical coherence tomography (OCT), which can precisely measure the distance to the brain’s surface as it throbs and moves beneath the dura.

Neuralink says eliminating the step of removing the dura simplifies the procedure and is an important step toward more automated, scalable brain implant surgeries.

“We like to say ‘the best step is no step’ and deleting the durectomy takes one of the most delicate manual steps out of the procedure,” the company says. “This potentially means a safer, more repeatable surgery, and a real path to scaling Neuralink to the many people who could benefit.”

The result: the participant was controlling a cursor with their thoughts within an hour of surgery, and recovery is progressing as expected, the company says.

My Take

Neuralink’s latest breakthrough comes in stark contrast to Meta’s recent Brain2Qwerty v2 research. In short, Meta thinks implants are difficult to scale, which is why they’re investigating the limits of what non-invasive imaging methods can achieve when combined with AI-assisted signal decoding.

For now, both Meta and Neuralink are currently hoping to help people with neurological injuries, which impair speech or movement to some extent, although I can’t help but wonder at how both companies are really talking about scaling. At this stage, they’re most definitely talking about scaling to other similarly affected people, although the real target seems fairly implicit : BCI will eventually be a consumer product, and companies need to do the heavy research now to reserve a spot at the table.

Neuralink N1 Implant exploded | Courtesy Neuralink

Granted, it’s still very early days. Invasive methods, like those used by Neuralink, provide a much higher signal-to-noise ratio when recording and decoding action potentials, although they still require a surgeon to saw out a quart-sized hole in your skull and put needles in your brain. For consumers at least, it’s the sort of elective surgery that will need to approach LASIK levels of safety and precision before it comes anywhere near a ‘neurotypical’ brain. Actually, probably even more than LASIK, as it would need to be sufficiently reversible and potentially upgradable too.

On the flipside, non-invasive methods like Brain2Qwert v2 make use of magnetoencephalography (MEG) imaging equipment strapped to your head, and rely more heavily on AI to decode signals from the respectively higher noise, since it has to infer action potentials from outside the skull. Meta says it can obtain better results than the more common electroencephalography (EEG) methods of imaging, although current MEG devices need to be used in a magnetically-shielded room to work.

I will continue to be impressed with the technical progress on both ends of the BCI spectrum, although I think it’s safe to say most people won’t have to worry about renting a piece of their brains to trillion-dollar market cap company for a little while longer.

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‘Cave Crave’ Brings Flooded Cave from Thai Rescue Mission in July Update

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Cave Crave (2025) developer 3R Games is bringing Thailand’s Tham Luang cave system to VR, the very same that gained global recognition in 2018 after a local junior football team became trapped inside due to sudden flooding.

The new addition is slated to arrive sometime next month following the 2025 release of the game’s Nutty Putty Cave update, promising to bring another real underground environment as a part of the studio’s expanding ‘Real Caves in VR’ initiative.

Having prompted a large international rescue effort in 2018, which tragically ended the lives of two cave divers attempting to rescue the 12 boys and their coach, the VR recreation of the Tham Luang system is focusing on the cave’s real structure and conditions rather than reinterpreting the event.

“Our goal remains the same,” said 3R Games CEO Piotr Surmacz, “we want to let players experience the scale, atmosphere, and complexity of iconic underground spaces from the inside.”

Surmacz says the team is “working to make the experience as authentic as possible,” while avoiding turning real events into traditional game mechanics; the Tham Luang update will arrive in Cave Crave’s ‘Tourist Mode’, which is designed for exploration rather than objectives or scoring.

The studio says it worked with specialists, including cave diver Vern Unsworth and 3D scanning expert Roo Walters, to bring the project to life, noting that the actual cave was captured using LiDAR-based scanning to capture geometry and spatial detail—something the team says will help preserve the cave’s “vastness, darkness, and unique underground character.”

The update will also offer the chance for players to swim in the game for the first time, as it will feature flooded corridors where limited visibility and restricted oxygen will create a “tense and challenging experience,” the studio says.

The update title is slated to arrive on all supported platforms next month, including Quest, SteamVR, and PSVR 2, with a non-VR version planned for Steam.

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Meta’s Brain AI Takes a Step Closer to Telepathy With Improved Thought-to-Text Decoding

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Meta has announced the next version of its AI system for non-invasively decoding brain activity into text. Called Brain2Qwerty v2, the company hopes its latest method will help people with neurological injuries or diseases that impair speech.

Meta’s latest brain-computer interface (BCI) builds off last year’s Brain2Qwerty v1, which initially showed that non-invasive brain recordings could be decoded into text with surprisingly high character-level accuracy. It used both electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG)—two non-invasive methods that measure the magnetic and electric fields elicited by neuronal activity—although it was only capable of decoding individual characters.

Now, the company has shown off its v2 model, which is said to improve nearly every aspect of the system by using an end-to-end architecture, large language models (LLMs), real-time decoding, and vastly improved pattern recognition.

Note: The findings was presented in a recent paper, which involved researchers from Meta and a host of universities and institutes, including Université PSL (incl. École Normale Supérieure), University of Lille, Paris Cité University, Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, Inria, CEA (NeuroSpin), Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL), and Hospital Foundation Adolphe de Rothschild.

According to the paper, Brain2Qwerty v2 was trained on approximately 22,000 sentences from nine volunteer participants, each of which were recorded for 10 hours wearing an MEG device while actively typing.

Meta says that instead of relying on hand-crafted pipelines to detect neural events, they used end-to-end deep learning to decode directly from raw brain signals—essentially meaning they could not only decode single letters like in v1, but also full words and sentences.

MEG user input via Brain2Qwerty v1 | Courtesy Meta

While v2 represents a pretty significant leap forward, it hasn’t approached 100 percent accuracy yet:

“Brain2Qwerty v2 recovers sentences coherently from noisy neural inputs, achieving a word accuracy rate of 61%, significantly improving upon the 8% word accuracy from other non-invasive methods,” Meta says.

Meta says its most performant participant achieved a 78% word accuracy, where “more than half of all sentences are decoded with one word error or less,” the company says.

“We also find that decoding accuracy improves log-linearly with data volume, suggesting that the remaining performance gap with surgical approaches could be further narrowed through data scaling alone.”

The project’s long-term goal is to develop communication technologies for people with neurological injuries or diseases that impair speech, notably without requiring invasive surgery, like Elon Musk’s Neuralink BCI startup, which expanded human clinical trials earlier this year.

Researchers highlight in Nature that while invasive methods are more efficient at thought-to-text, they expose patients to “nonnegligible risks of brain hemorrhage and infection.” Very real challenges in maintaining cortical implant function over extended time periods is also a risk, making invasive methods less scalable overall.

That said, there’s still a long way to go before we see anything approaching consumer-grade MEG devices. Many of the classical MEG devices of today are still very much “helmet in a hospital room” levels of massive, although there are smaller devices now that can operate at room temperatures, like Cerca’s optically-pumped magnetometers (OPMs).

The key limiter holding MEG back though for eventual consumer adoption is background magnetic interference, which requires even these much smaller systems to work in a magnetically-shielded environment; the magnetic fields generated by the brain are much weaker than the Earth’s magnetic field and the host of everyday tech like smartphones, Wi-Fi, and power lines which are all millions of times stronger.

Whatever the case, it’s heartening to see that patients who can’t qualify for invasive BCI could get a significant boost in quality of life someday, hopefully soon.

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Quest Peak Summer Sale Brings Big Savings to Top VR Titles

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It’s heat wave season again, which means Meta is throwing out some pretty sweet deals on some of the best Quest games out there.

From now until July 5th, you’ll be able to grab some of our favorite VR titles in Meta’s Peak Summer Sale, including hits like The Climb 2, Synth Riders, Blade & Sorcery: Nomad, Arizona Sunshine II, Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City, Clone Drone in the Hyperdome, and a heck of a lot more.

You’ll find links and prices for all of those and more below, alongside a list of games you might want to check out too. As always, you can find the whole stack of discounted Quest titles over on the Peak Summer Sale page.

Game	Sale	MSRP	% Off
Alien: Rogue Incursion	$10	$40	75%
Arizona Sunshine II	$15	$30	50%
Blade & Sorcery: Nomad	$24	$30	20%
Breachers	$12	$20	40%
BRINK Traveler	$9	$15	40%
The Climb 2	$14	$30	53%
Clone Drone in the Hyperdome	$12	$20	40%
Cooking Clash	$10	$15	33%
Cosmonious High	$14	$20	30%
Creed: Rise to Glory – Championship Edition	$12	$30	60%
Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked	$24	$30	20%
Drums Rock	$10	$20	50%
Dungeons of Eternity	$15	$30	50%
Elements Divided	$10	$15	33%
Eleven Table Tennis	$18	$30	40%
FLY – A Google Earth Flight Sim	$7	$10	30%
Ghosts of Tabor	$17	$25	32%
Golden Gloves	$12	$20	40%
Human Fall Flat VR	$8	$13	38%
Kaiju Battle Simulator	$8	$12	33%
LES MILLS Bodycombat	$19	$30	37%
Maestro	$12	$25	52%
Metro Awakening	$15	$30	50%
Ocean Rift	$7	$10	30%
The Pirate: Republic of Nassau	$12	$20	40%
Prison Boss VR	$8	$20	60%
Real Fishing VR	$14	$20	30%
Shave & Stuff	$12	$15	20%
Slime Lab	$15	$20	25%
Strayed	$12	$15	20%
SUPERHOT VR	$20	$25	20%
Synth Riders	$13	$25	48%
Tactical Assault VR	$15	$20	25%
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City	$19	$25	24%
Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow	$14	$20	30%
Titans Clinic	$15	$18	17%
Vacation Simulator	$14	$20	30%
Virtual Skate	$11	$20	45%
War of Wizards	$16	$20	20%
Wreckin’ Raccoon	$8	$12	33%

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