AWE USA 2026 is returning to Long Beach, CA on June 15–18. As the event’s Premiere Media Partner, we’re excited to give our readers the opportunity to win one of several free passes.
AWE USA is our ‘must-go’ annual XR event. This year’s rendition is expected to draw more than 5,000 attendees, 3,250 exhibitors, 400 speakers, and will feature a 150,000 sqft expo floor.
We’re giving away several General Admission passes which offer access to all four days of the event, including talks, panels, and the expo floor.
To enter for a chance to win a free General admission pass to AWE USA 2026, join our Daily Roundup Newsletter below (even if you’re already a subscriber!).
By submitting the form above, you agree to allow us to send you the Daily Roundup Newsletter and communications about AWE events. You may alternatively enter to win a pass by emailing AWEUSA2026@roadtovr.com with the subject line “Entry”. Only one submission per entrant will be considered. Winners will be selected randomly and notified via the email they signed up with. Passes are non-transferrable and non-refundable.
Snap is laying off around 1,000 employees, the Snapchat parent confirmed today. Specs Inc., its recently formed AR glasses subsidiary, is reportedly not being affected, however, as the cuts are aimed at further insulating the traditional Snapchat business from its new AR subsidiary.
Spiegel announced the news in an internal memo, published by Business Insider, which is confirmed to affect 1,000 team members, including 16% of Snap’s full-time employees. Spiegel also confirmed Snap has now closed more than 300 open roles.
“Last fall, I described Snap as facing a crucible moment, requiring a new way of working that is faster and more efficient, while pivoting towards profitable growth,” Spiegel says in the memo. “Over the past several months, we have carefully reviewed the work required to best serve our community and partners, and made tough choices to prioritize the investments we believe are most likely to create long-term value. As a result of these changes, we expect to reduce our annualized cost base by more than $500 million by the second half of 2026, helping to establish a clearer path to net-income profitability.”
Snap Spectacles (gen 5) | Image courtesy Snap Inc
While Spiegel hasn’t confirmed the fate of Specs Inc. specifically, according to a report by Alex Heath’s Sources the company’s AR glasses subsidiary is slated to actually add employees ahead of launch of its sixth-gen Specs AR glasses, which is expected sometime this fall.
The report further maintains Snap was unable to secure a proposed $1 billion to fund its Specs division, although the company is still hoping to raise capital once its AR glasses release.
The next-gen Specs AR glasses are slated to be revealed “in the next couple of months, loosely modeled on Apple’s Vision Pro rollout, followed by a consumer release in the fall,” Heath writes.
The comes weeks after Irenic Capital Management, which holds economic interest of about 2.5% in Snap, put pressure on the company to either spin off or shut down Specs Inc.
According to a Reuters last month, the activist investor also called on Snap to consider cutting costs through layoffs and to buy back more discounted stock, among other moves, which at the time of this writing seems to be the course the company has taken.
This follows recent news that Specs Inc. and chip maker Qualcomm have signed a multi-year partnership for Snap’s upcoming AR glasses, with Qualcomm pledging Snapdragon chips for future iterations—seemingly signaling confidence that Snap is betting on the success of Specs.
Read the full memo from Snap CEO Evan Spiegel below, courtesy Business Insider:
Dear Team,
Today we are announcing changes that will impact approximately 1,000 team members at Snap, including 16% of our full time employees, in addition to closing more than 300 open roles. This is an incredibly difficult decision, and I am deeply sorry to the colleagues who will be leaving us. You have made important contributions to Snap, and we are committed to supporting you through this transition.
Last fall, I described Snap as facing a crucible moment, requiring a new way of working that is faster and more efficient, while pivoting towards profitable growth. Over the past several months, we have carefully reviewed the work required to best serve our community and partners, and made tough choices to prioritize the investments we believe are most likely to create long-term value. As a result of these changes, we expect to reduce our annualized cost base by more than $500 million by the second half of 2026, helping to establish a clearer path to net-income profitability.
While these changes are necessary to realize Snap’s long-term potential, we believe that rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers. We have already witnessed small squads leveraging AI tools to drive meaningful progress across several important initiatives, including Snapchat+, enhanced ad platform performance, and efficiency improvements in our Snap Lite infrastructure.
If you are part of our North America team, please work from home today. In the US, impacted team members will receive an email notification within the next hour, including information about next steps. For non-US locations, you will receive additional details about next steps from leadership and HR.
To our departing colleagues: thank you. Your hard work has helped shape Snap, and we are deeply grateful for your contributions. For U.S.-based team members who are leaving, we will provide four months of severance, healthcare coverage, and equity vesting, along with career transition support.
Outside the U.S., we will follow local processes and seek to provide comparable support aligned with local norms.
To everyone continuing on this journey: change of this magnitude and at this speed is never easy and it will not be seamless. Thank you for your resilience, compassion, and commitment to one another, and to the community and partners we serve. Our responsibility is to move forward with clarity, empathy, and determination as we build a faster, stronger, and more durable Snap for the long term.
An ACLU-led coalition representing more than 70 civil liberties advocacy groups are pushing back against Meta’s reported plans to bring facial recognition to its smart glasses.
The New York Timesinitially reported in February that Meta is currently exploring who should be recognizable through its smart glasses, as the company ostensibly hopes to bring some form of facial recognition to Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses.
According to the NYT report, possible options include “recognizing people a user knows because they are connected on a Meta platform, and identifying people whom the user may not know but who have a public account on a Meta site like Instagram.”
Now, as reported by Wired, an ACLU-led coalition hopes to oppose those plans, which the group says could turn Meta’s smart glasses into ad hoc “surveillance glasses,” capable of endangering consumers and vulnerable communities, and broadly undermining civil rights and civil liberties.
Ray-Ban Meta ‘Scriber’ model | Image courtesy Meta, EssilorLuxottica
The group, which also includes the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Fight for the Future, Access Now, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, issued an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday urging the company to stop and publicly disavow its plans.
“People should be able to move through their daily lives without fear that stalkers, scammers, abusers, federal agents, and activists across the political spectrum are silently and invisibly verifying their identities and potentially matching their names to a wealth of readily available data about their habits, hobbies, relationships, health, and behaviors,” the letter reads.
Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses & Neural Band | Image courtesy Meta
“It isn’t hard to see how easily this technology could be abused by corporations, private individuals, and the government to target immigrants, LGBTQIA+ people, and other vulnerable groups,” an ACLU petition adds. “It also puts domestic violence and stalking survivors at risk and could even be used to go after protestors or people who criticize the government.”
Meta has bowed to public pressure before, albeit after years of costly litigation. As mentioned by Wired, in November 2021 the company ended Facebook’s photo-tagging system and said it would delete the facial recognition templates of more than a billion users, which at the time was called “a company-wide move to limit the use of facial recognition in our products.”
Neither Meta, nor its hardware partner EssilorLuxottica responded to Wired’s request for comment.
This follows news in February that Meta’s smart glasses partner EssilorLuxottica sold over seven million smart glasses in 2025 alone; that year the companies not only shipped a hardware refresh of Ray-Ban Meta, but also Oakley Meta HSTN, Oakley Meta Vanguard, and the $800 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses—the company’s first smart glasses to include a heads-up display.
It’s not just Meta making smart glasses though. Meanwhile, a rash of competitors are currently preparing their own smart glasses for consumer release; Google, Samsung and Amazon have all announced their own devices, while Apple is also reportedly developing multiple pairs.
Pimax recently announced it was being forced to change a key component in all Crystal Super PC VR headsets and display accessories moving forward, effectively making one of VR’s most modular headsets decidedly less so.
The News
Crystal Super is renowned for being highly modular thanks to its ability to swap optical engines, which includes a 50 PPD, 57 PPD, micro-OLED, and ultrawide (140° FOV) modules.
Launched just last year, Crystal Super initially shipped with a custom 70-pin connector, which married up to all of those accessories on offer. Simply swap out a module, and you suddenly have a PC VR headset with a higher pixel density, better clarity, or wider field-of-view.
Now, Pimax says in a blog post its supplier for those 70-pin connectors is discontinuing the part, which has left the company in the lurch, forcing it to change the key component that made its optical display ecosystem so modular in the first place.
Pimax Crystal Super Optical Engine | Image courtesy Pimax
In the blog post, Pimax says it’s now allocated “all remaining stock of this connector to the Crystal Super to ensure compatibility with all optical engine variants,” noting that there will now be two (incompatible) variants of the Crystal Super in production and circulation.
Pimax says it’s going to ameliorate this by matching headsets and optical engines at the time of purchase, which it’s doing both from the factory with full kits and by matching user-provided headset serial numbers when headset owners return to buy single modules.
While Pimax bought all of the last remaining stock of those original 70-pin connectors and maintains it has “ample inventory”, it’s admittedly a number that will only get smaller. Pimax’s Head of Communication Jaap Grolleman is optimistic though that supplies will last.
“Based on previous headset sales and survey data (and sales estimations), we think we have enough stock to supply current (70-pin) Crystal Super owners with matching optical engines throughout their product lifetime,” Jaap Grolleman tells Road to VR.
Pimax Crystal Super | Image courtesy Pimax
“This was also one of the reasons why we delayed the Crystal Super Lighthouse, as that model swapped the 70-pin for a USB-C connector—and it’s also one of the reasons that now new Crystal Super headsets are produced with the new pin; to keep enough stock of the 70-pin for optical engine production for those owners,” Grolleman says.
A very real wrinkle in all of this: there’s no visual indicator of which pin style you might have just by looking at it, which puts the onus entirely on the user. Although Pimax’s solution is to simply provide the headset’s serial number when ordering directly from the company, that makes buying on the secondhand market a bit more tricky.
“There is no visual difference (and no performance difference), although the pins have a different width. Telling them apart is very difficult for users unless the optical engines are directly compared side by side,” Grolleman says.
Image courtesy Pimax
Notably, Pimax says you can contact them when encountering compatibility issues with secondhand modules, although that’s going to have to be after the fact since it’s so difficult to tell between the two. Pimax hasn’t said whether more modular optical engines are on the way besides the ones already released.
That said, the pin connector switch is not entirely out of the blue, as the company warned users late last year that sourcing the 70-pin connector could be an issue. Still, Grolleman says around 10 to 20 optical engines with the new connector pin were shipped prior to the company’s announcement, which was released on Monday.
“We knew this change would come in the future, but with multiple teams working in parallel, there was an information gap and the first batch had already been shipped out. We’ll do an internal review, and we’ll also contact these users as soon as possible,” Grolleman says.
My Take
The question isn’t whether this all leads to fragmentation, resale risk, or consumer confusion for Crystal Super, because it plainly does. It’s whether Pimax users are willing to continue to invest in a modular ecosystem that’s been so uncomfortably split mid-generation.
I can’t answer that question for you, although I can highlight this: we don’t know whether the company has plans for more optical engines, which could make issues worse for users with a 70-pin connector headset, as it will strain supplies even further. We also don’t know how long the company expects to produce Crystal Super before it goes onto its next big gamble. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about Pimax over the past decade, there’s always something new on the horizon.
Which is weird. If any other company absolutely borked sourcing a key component like Pimax did with its linchpin connector—undoubtedly putting a big asterisk next to the word “modular” when talking about Crystal Super—it would be a serious sign that something is wrong. But for Pimax, these sort of perpetual teething issues just seems like the price of innovation. So, I just can’t say I’m surprised.
AWE USA 2026 is returning to the Long Beach, CA on June 15–18. As the most important annual XR event on our calendar, we’re excited to once again be able to offer a 20% discount on tickets to AWE USA 2026 as the event’s Premiere Media Partner. Here’s a look at why we’re going (and think you should too).
The key thing that makes AWE USA our ‘must-go’ event is its scope and focus. While there are many great annual events out there in the world of tech, XR is often only a small segment of a broader event. Meanwhile, AWE USA is focused entirely on XR.
Whether you’re a headset maker, startup founder, game developer, enterprise solution seeker, immersive artist, investor, or even just a diehard XR enthusiast, there’s something for everyone. Here’s an overview to see where you or your company fits in:
Indies and startups can get big discounts on passes, stage time in the expo hall, and networking with mentors and investors.
Plus there’s an opportunity to pitch in front of a panel of XR experts and investors and get exclusive access to a dedicated networking event through the Startup Pitch Competition. Winners will be awarded the ‘Start-up to Watch’ title at the Auggie Award ceremony.
The annual Auggie Awards have been the most recognized AR & VR industry awards in the world since 2010. Now in their 17th year, the Auggies continue to showcase the best of the best in augmented, virtual and mixed reality. Winners will be presented with a prestigious Auggie Award at the Auggie Awards Ceremony during the conference.
There are 18 distinct categories in which to compete, including two new ones this year: ‘Best Reality Capture’, a new category for the hardware and software recreating our physical world in 3D, from LiDAR and photogrammetry to Gaussian splats and digital twins. We’ve also teamed up with The XR Guild to launch the ‘Most Ethical Product’ award, which honors an XR product that demonstrates exceptional commitment to ethical design, responsible data practices, user safety, and positive societal impact, proving that immersive technology can advance innovation without compromising human values.
Gaming and location-based XR experiences are getting an expanded focused this year at AWE USA. Thanks to an even bigger dedicated show floor area, there are still open slots available for showcasing new games and LBE experiences. Studios confirmed already include nDreams, Mighty Coconut, Kluge Interactive, Odders Lab, and Chicken Waffle. Confirmed XR influencers include:Nathie, Cas and Chary XR, GingasVR, TigressX, KaleahVR, and Fix My Oculus.
AWE USA is the premier stage to demonstrate your market leadership to the entire XR ecosystem. Join the world’s most influential tech providers to solidify your position, drive industry adoption, and set the roadmap for the future of XR. Exhibit your platform to more than 5,000 attendees on the bustling 150,000 sq ft expo floor. Road to VR readers can get an exclusive 10% discount on sponsors and exhibitor packages at AWE USA.
Enterprise leaders are looking for partners who can turn the cutting edge of spatial technology into genuine ROI. AWE USA is the world’s largest gathering of decision-makers seeking the expertise of agencies, studios, and consultancies. Position your firm at the center of the ecosystem to win new business, showcase your portfolio, and stay ahead of the technology curve.
AWE USA’s 150,000 sq ft expo floor is your chance to preview the bleeding-edge of XR, find new opportunities, and get involved with the XR community. And, if you’re willing to lend a hand, you can apply to volunteer at the event in exchange for a 4-day All Access pass.
AWE USA will be held at the Long Beach Convention Center in California from June 15–18, and it’s expected to draw more than 5,000 attendees, 3,250 exhibitors, 400 speakers, and will feature a 150,000 sqft expo floor. If you’re planning to attend, don’t miss our exclusive 20% discount on tickets!
Apple is ostensibly gearing up to release its first pair of smart glasses next year. A new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman however maintains the Cupertino tech giant is now evaluating several styles and color combinations, as well as a distinct camera lens shape.
The report largely echoes previous rumors, which maintain the device (internally codenamed N50) could be unveiled at the end of 2026 or early 2027, with launch slated for sometime in 2027.
Like Meta’s audio-only smart glasses from Ray-Ban and Oakley though, Apple’s smart glasses are reportedly said to omit any sort of display. Instead, they’ll primarily focus on capturing photos and videos, making phone calls, listening to notifications and music, and interacting with an AI voice assistant—a better version of Siri coming to iOS 27, the report maintains.
According to Bloomberg’s sources, Apple’s design team now has at least four different styles in play, with plans to launch some or all of them. Styes are said to include:
A large rectangular frame, reminiscent of Ray-Ban Wayfarers
A slimmer rectangular design, similar to the glasses worn by Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook
Larger oval or circular frames
A smaller, more refined oval or circular option
The glasses are said to be made from acetate, a higher-quality plastic than the thermoplastic used in Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Additionally, Apple is reportedly planning “many” color options in addition to exploring “a range of finishes, including black, ocean blue and light brown.”
Unlike Ray-Ban Meta, Apple’s first smart glasses are said to include a new camera lens shape, which Bloomberg maintains will be “vertically oriented oval lenses with surrounding lights,” a break from Meta’s circular camera lens design.
Apple’s forthcoming glasses are reportedly a part of a broader, “three-pronged AI wearables strategy,” which is slated to include new AirPods and a camera-equipped pendant. Like with all of its accessories, Apple hopes to achieve an “instantly recognizable” design, which the company refers to as “icon” internally.
Notably, Apple’s smart glasses plans mark a stark departure from its initial XR strategy when it first formed the product division around a decade ago. Back then, the company reportedly hoped to develop three distinct categories: an iPhone-tethered AR headset with wireless controller, a high-end mixed reality headset, and standalone AR glasses.
The company has only released two iterations of Vision Pro though—ostensibly a different product from the high-end MR headset the company envisioned. Meanwhile, industry insiders suggest Apple is years away from the release of standalone AR glasses, making its audio-only smart glasses a first step of many.
Snap’s new XR subsidiary Specs Inc and Qualcomm announced a multi-year partnership for Snap’s upcoming AR glasses, with Qualcomm pledging Snapdragon chips for future iterations. The companies also reaffirmed that Snap’s next-gen Specs are coming “later this year.”
Specs Inc, which was formed by Snap in January to handle its XR efforts, is working with Qualcomm in what the companies call a “long-term strategic roadmap” which aims to rapidly bring things like “on-device AI, cutting-edge graphics, and advanced multiuser digital experiences,” the companies said in a joint press statement.
“Snap Inc. and Qualcomm Technologies have a strong track record of powering advanced immersive technology. This agreement builds on more than five years of innovation and collaboration, as Snapdragon platforms have powered multiple previous generations of Snap’s Spectacles,” the companies said.
Image courtesy Snap Inc, Niantic
Snap’s sixth gen Specs are looking to appeal to consumers while also possibly also frontrunning its largest competitors, including Meta, Samsung, Google, and Apple.
While Snap hasn’t shown off its next-gen Specs yet, the company seems to be leaning heavily into the device’s built-in AI, something that “uses its understanding of you and your world to help get things done on your behalf while protecting and respecting your privacy,” Snap said earlier this year.
“The next era of computing will be defined by devices that understand what you see, hear and say as well as context, and respond instantly to the world around you,” said Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon. “Our work on future generations of Specs will enable power-efficient interactive AR devices that deliver agentic experiences that feel natural, intuitive and integrate seamlessly into daily life.”
Aiming for release sometime this year, the next iteration of Spec will technically be the company’s second pair of AR glasses, following its fifth-gen release in 2024.
Besides Snap noting the new AR device will be smaller and lighter, feature see-through AR optics, and be powered by some form of Snapdragon XR SoC, its specs are largely still a mystery.
