CES 2025 Took place last month in Vegas and as always, this event offers a look at some of the latest technology from manufacturers from around the world. It’s often a chance for journalists and tech industry members to get hands-on experience with these products and even get to see some experimental technology that may come to the market in the next few years.
Yulio always keeps an eye on CES and the announcements coming out of the events surrounding Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. This event always has new products on display that showcase the latest developments in the VR/AR industry, and we can get a glimpse at what the future of VR Headsets could look like. The CES 2025 VR announcements were no exception to this, and several new products and trends have us very curious about where this industry will go.
Read on for our top CES 2025 VR Announcements.
Manufacturers Continuing to Develop New AR/Smart Glasses
This year we saw a continuation of a trend that we saw last year with many manufacturers trying to break into the market with AR Smart glasses. With the popularity of mobile VR headsets, many manufacturers have been making a comparable product, but with a focus on AR capabilities. These devices are often much smaller than the average VR headset and can more closely resemble a normal pair of glasses (albeit with a thicker frame).
Image credit: TCL
In marketing for most of these AR devices, they focus on the multitasking features that they can help with and offer experiences like previous iterations of smart wearables. A main focus seems to be recording footage from a first-person perspective and offering connectivity to your other smart devices to display information in your vision rather than making you look at your phone. These displays aren’t quite at the level of power that the Apple Vision pro has with its multiscreen views and spatial computing. Rather it’s more subtle and more along the line of how a smart watch would connect to your phone.
This Year at CES many new AR glasses were displayed and they’re beginning to look a lot like the early years of VR headsets with the many different iterations and designs that were on display. One brand we’ve been watching is TCL, which is a manufacturer that is more well known in North America for their TVs. This year they showcase the RayNeo X3 which is the third iteration of their AR glasses. The consensus around the RayNeo X3 is that it’s a marked improvement and the display is much easier to read. We will be keeping an eye on how TCL continues to develop this product.
Sony Announcing a New XR headset, The Sony XYN
A new piece of hardware has been announced by SONY targeting mixed reality content creators. The SONY XYN XR headset bears some resemblance to their PSVR2 headset in its design, but Sony is trying to go beyond games with this new device. Sony seems to be focusing on tailoring this headset to 3D content creators rather than having a strictly gaming audience. But what does that mean exactly?
Image credit: Future
Well alongside this announcement Sony also unveiled some rather flashy spatial recording software for XYN. With this new software creating 3D for AR has become a much easier process. Also, they introduced XYN motion capture software. With simple motion trackers attached to a person, one can record highly detailed motion captures that before now would have required expensive facilities and equipment that only would’ve been available to those with a high budget. Now amateur animators, programmers and designers can get detailed body animations for 3D content on their own. This will be a very exciting thing to see develop when it comes to creating 3D content for mixed reality in the future.
New Processing Power on the Way for VR Headsets
Shortly before CES 2025 the New Qualcomm XR2+ chip was announced to the public. However, at CES, attendees got to learn more about this new chip and got a better idea of the power it will bring to mobile devices. Qualcomm chips are the main chips used in VR headsets across the board and the continued advancement of these small but powerful chips leads to a continued performance boost for VR/AR/XR technology in the coming years. We’ve already seen the difference that these chips can offer over the years as the experience between Meta Quest 1 and Meta Quest 3 is night and day and that is only after just a few short years of development. We can’t wait to see what this new power will bring to XR devices and how we can take advantage of it to create VR/AR experiences that are even more immersive than they are now.
Keep your eyes on Yulio’s blog for more VR news throughout the year and learn more about how you can use VR in your presentations to bring your design projects to life.
