Hey r/augmentedreality,

We’re the team behind Nimbo X1, and we’re here for the AMA we promised.

First, some good news: Nimbo X1 is officially funded on Kickstarter.

A huge thank you to everyone who backed us, followed the project, asked tough questions, or sent us feedback along the way. We really appreciate it.

For anyone new here: Nimbo X1 is a 49g pair of full-color AR glasses built around our 0.7mm single-layer SiC waveguide. The product design is complete, and we’re ready for mass production.

X1 supports translation, navigation, AI assistant, teleprompter, a large virtual display, controller-supported gaming, and more.

For developers, we made the platform as open as we reasonably could, with system-level signing access, an open SDK, low-level hardware interfaces, raw sensor data access, and an independent App Center.

One of the biggest engineering decisions behind X1 was the single-layer Silicon Carbide waveguide. We’re happy to go deep on why we chose SiC, the trade-offs behind our 30° FOV, and what it took to get the optics ready for mass production.

Ask us anything about:

• SiC waveguides & optical design
• Hardware engineering and the 49g design
• Open SDK, system-level access & 3DOF tracking
• Software features & real-world use
• Manufacturing & mass production
• Kickstarter and what comes next

Members of our optics, hardware, systems, software, and product teams will be answering questions live.

And no need to hold back. If you disagree with any of our design decisions, ask us about them. We’re happy to talk about the trade-offs.

We’ll start answering today at 5:00 PM PDT / 8:00 PM EDT.

Drop your questions below.

Thanks again for all the support. See you in the comments.

— The Nimbo Team

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nimbopearl/nimbo-x1-worlds-lightest-sic-color-display-ar-glasses

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement banned all enforcement officers and office staff from wearing Meta smart glasses in federal workspaces to prevent the unintentional recording, storage, and external transmission of sensitive information. ICE classified the devices as de facto body-worn cameras, citing privacy and surveillance risks associated with the integrated cameras and microphones capturing bystanders.

To deploy secure, dedicated hardware for operational use, its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, requested 7.5 million dollars in April to develop smart glasses prototypes for immigration enforcement, aiming to equip field officers with immediate individual identification and data access capabilities. Industry analysts note that mass adoption now depends on device trustworthiness, with proposed solutions including clear external recording indicators and processing sensitive data internally to minimize transmission.

A couple of years ago, we would've probably called you crazy if you told us Track Craft would one day run on a pair of AR glasses.

Well, that day is here.

Track Craft will be available on the new Specs.  

I've seen the XReal Glasses at CES but this was the first real proper usage I've seen them used in the wild. The one in Exhibit in Tokyo had finished but I managed to catch it in Kobe.

Hi all, I haven't posted here much. I'm Brandon. I love XR/VR tech. I run a channel that reviews it full time. It's my passion, and I love talking about it. This list focuses mainly on XR/VR glasses that could be used as display glasses for gaming, movie watching, productivity, and a walkaround wearable display for the above functions. It's a value and feature focused list and is derived mainly from my 1000+ hours using the various XR glasses. None of any my work is written or generated by AI.

Looking for feedback - What am I missing from these overviews charts? Any typos or errors? or did I get any info wrong? First draft of this! Thanks! This is a work in progress and will be adjusted as needed for my upcoming XR reviews through community feedback/correction. I hope you don't mind me sharing my work here. My goal is to help everyone find they love, by finding the tech I love.

XR glasses by Rating in brief:

Viture Beast - 90% - Just such good value, super bright, poppy visuals, and still the best center sharpness. Blacks can be crushed, but there are ways of fixing this.

XReal One Pro - 88% - High quality product, just works. Recommended for productivity on a budget, but really higher resolution is needed for optimal productivity for all XR glasses. Recommending QHD+ or higher for optimal productivity.

XReal R1 - 85% (similar to One Pro, but docked 3% because costs more due to dock and redesign with RGB, but basically the same as the One Pro)

Viture Pro 2 / XReal 1S - 85% - Both great value XR glasses. XReal 1S for cheapest reliable anchoring. Pro 2 for cheapest Myopia sliding dials and sharp overall image.

XBX / Luma Ultra - 83% - XBX great value, Luma Ultra worth it for some users and use cases, like with Pro Neckband

RayNeo Air 4 Pro 78% - The cheapest overall XR glasses and highest rated in the value category, excellent for people on a budget and want to save money for gaming and movie watching using AI HDR or HDR10. The DRIFT on the 3DOF sensor hurts the rating a lot here, as it reduces the functionaltiy of the XR glasses for productivity as well as potential 3DOF SteamVR support. Got to spend more for those features, apparently.

Dream Air SLAM - Super small VR headset that could be used to power 4K virtual screens (soon to have VertoXR support) for super sharp text productivity or gaming at high PPD for many use cases. This could work great on the go for handheld gaming and productivity with powerful laptops or desktops at home. Obviously, peak VR visuals as well. Review unit incoming in like a week. Needs hands on testing. I have seen mixed feedback on the SLAM tracking.

Five Bonus Upcoming XR Glasses to be excited about before the end of 2026 -->

URXR One - Promising increased resolution XR/VR headset, Launching 10/26 supposedly. They will be sending production unit for detailed review around launch.

Viture QHD glasses coming before the end of 2026. Needs testing. From what I have heard from Viture, seems promising. I can't share details.

XReal Aura - 6DOF XR glasses that will have a puck paired with them. $1500+. Higher FOV. Should be excellent for many use cases. But not going to be higher resolution, which makes me sad.

RayNeo GT and GT MAX will be added to this list in the next month or so, as they being sent to me now. Seem very promising with onboard chip based 3DOF and reasonable pricing $300-400. Needs testing to see if the Anchor is good and lens quality. Might be discount Beast, basically.

Thanks for reading!

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Keio University propose Ground Reaction Inertial Poser. GRIP observes motion using four IMUs and foot pressure data from smartwatches and smart insoles. Full-body motion is reconstructed by driving a humanoid with joint torques in a physics simulator.

Abstract

We propose Ground Reaction Inertial Poser (GRIP), a method that reconstructs physically plausible human motion using four wearable devices. Unlike conventional IMU-only approaches, GRIP combines IMU signals with foot pressure data to capture both body dynamics and ground interactions. Furthermore, rather than relying solely on kinematic estimation, GRIP uses a digital twin of a person, in the form of a synthetic humanoid in a physics simulator, to reconstruct realistic and physically plausible motion. At its core, GRIP consists of two modules: KinematicsNet, which estimates body poses and velocities from sensor data, and DynamicsNet, which controls the humanoid in the simulator using the residual between the KinematicsNet prediction and the simulated humanoid state. To enable robust training and fair evaluation, we introduce a large-scale dataset, Pressure and Inertial Sensing for Human Motion and Interaction (PRISM), that captures diverse human motions with synchronized IMUs and insole pressure sensors. Experimental results show that GRIP outperforms existing IMU-only and IMU–pressure fusion methods across all evaluated datasets, achieving higher global pose accuracy and improved physical consistency.

https://ryosukehori.github.io/grip-project/?trk=public_post_comment-text

On my recent trip to Shenzhen, I walked through Huaqiangbei—the world’s largest electronics market, spanning a network of multi-story malls packed with thousands of stalls. A growing number of those booths are now selling XR eyewear. Take a look at the photo gallery to see what is on the floor. While you will still find plenty of cheap audio and camera frames, established tech brands have a much bigger presence than they did a year ago. In fact, district-wide Smart Glasses sales were up 100% year-over-year during the first seven months of 2026.

My favorite shop this year was in Yuanwang Digital Mall. They had the widest lineup by far. Displays ranged from entry-level camera frames to flagship glasses from Qwen, RayNeo, XREAL, INMO, iFlytek, INAIR, Rokid, MLVision, Holoswim, and Goolton. They even had the only pair of LLVISION glasses I have seen anywhere, and even an Epson HMD.

Huaqiangbei is more than just a massive retail spot—it is an integrated hardware supply chain with an ultra-fast turnaround. Thanks to its hyper-localized prototyping, manufacturing, and assembly network, teams can take a new concept to market in days rather than months. By pairing hands-on floor testing with online sales, roughly 40% of the district's outbound shipments now head abroad to over 190 countries.

We see the same momentum across the rest of China. Across all channels, smart glasses sales hit 909,000 units and 1.88 billion RMB in the first half of 2026, up 85.5% and 98.7% year-over-year. That volume was helped along by national consumer subsidies offering a direct 15% discount (up to 500 RMB) and a new wave of sub-1,000 RMB frames running on-device AI models.

While that total market volume includes physical stores, the latest RUNTO brand rankings only track online sales. RayNeo led the e-commerce charts with an 18.9% share, followed by Rokid at 16.7%. Alibaba’s Qwen took third place at 8.6%, while Alibaba’s Quark came in sixth. Combined, Alibaba's two brands nearly catch Rokid online—and from my impression walking Shenzhen's brick-and-mortar eyewear stores, their physical retail footprint actually beats Rokid and RayNeo already. Huawei took fourth place at 8.2%, with XREAL in fifth and Xiaomi in seventh.

This was Part 3 | Part 2 | Part 1

Bought these at the start of the month. Was between them and the Meta Ray-Ban Display for weeks, went RayNeo because I wanted more headroom to tinker. Three weeks in, still wearing them almost every day, and the reason turned out to be different from what got me interested in the first place.

Quick hardware note. 76g titanium frame, dual-eye microLED waveguide with a 30° diagonal FOV that RayNeo positions as a 43-inch equivalent at 2m (feels like a big virtual monitor a couple feet ahead in practice), Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1, 4GB/32GB, Sony IMX681 12MP plus an OV mono cam for depth/SLAM, IP52. 245mAh battery, more on that later.

What the stock stuff gets right

Out of the box you get Gemini 2.5 as the assistant, ~2s live translation with on-lens text, POV photo/video, and a teleprompter that's genuinely great for recording talking-head stuff. Camera holds up well in daylight for point-of-view shots. Translation works in the languages I tried (Spanish, Japanese for signs), fast enough that I've mostly stopped reaching for my phone for signs when traveling. AIOS launcher is smooth, and Gemini's context-aware answers are legit useful when you're walking around somewhere unfamiliar.

But what made these actually stick for me is the layer below.

The bit nobody talks about: sideload is a first-class citizen

The X3 Pro has ADB debugging as an official settings toggle. You go Settings > General, put the highlight on About Device, then swipe left ten times on the touchpad. Chinese text and "adb" pop up on the display, that's it, developer mode is live. Turn on App Lab from the settings menu too. Then you can adb install anything.

Fully documented. Qualcomm has an official "Get Started with RayNeo X3 Pro AR Development" landing page, and RayNeo will send you the Mercury SDK (their spatial/head-tracking hooks) if you ask through the dev channel.

The result is a slowly growing dev ecosystem. What I'm running:

- RayDesk (github.com/Quad-Labs/RayDesk). Open source, GPL-3.0, purpose-built for the X3 Pro. Streams my home PC over WiFi using Sunshine as the host. Three display modes. Keyhole is the one I use most, lets you head-pan across the full desktop like it's projected on a wall. Floating pins a virtual monitor that follows your gaze. Curved wraps a widescreen around you, best when you have one giant doc or a wide dashboard to plow through. Temple gestures map to click/scroll/right-click, triple-tap opens a radial settings menu. This is the thing that changed how I use these glasses.

- A separate Moonlight-Android port for the X3 Pro (informalTechCode/moonlight-android-RayNeoX3) that skews toward gaming latency. Solid alternative if you care more about gamestream than desktop work.

- Chrome APK, works fine.

- YouTube Music via Gbox. Some friction on first auth, then stable.

- A couple Unity APKs a friend built for testing, ran fine.

RayDesk is at v1.0.0 as of February 2026, small project with 2 stars right now but the thing actually works. Setup is Sunshine on the PC, apk on the glasses, same WiFi, pair with a PIN. About 15 min if adb behaves. On Windows you might need the Zadig USB driver tool if adb can't see the device at first. On Mac it's a Homebrew one-liner and it just works.

What I actually use it for now

Maybe 90% of my wear time is RayDesk in Keyhole mode. Reading long docs away from my desk. Kitchen counter, couch, back porch when the weather is ok. Having Grafana and some dev logs up on a floating monitor while I'm doing something with my hands. Occasionally streaming a game but slow stuff, Balatro is fine, twitchier games start showing the wireless input lag.

The two honest tradeoffs

Battery is the one you'll hear about in every review and it's real. 60 to 90 minutes of RayDesk streaming depending on brightness. There is a USB-C on the temple so you can top up from a power bank while wearing them, which I do at the couch. Not elegant but it works, and honestly at the rate I'm running these I'd have wanted to top up anyway.

Sideload has a learning curve first time. Plan on 30 to 60 minutes if you've never touched ADB before. Once you're through it, installing a new APK is a one-line command and you don't think about it again.

Who this actually clicks for

People who wanted an open Android device on their face and enjoy tinkering with a home lab or dev setup. If that's you the X3 Pro turns into something a lot more capable than the marketing shows, and RayDesk in particular is what pushed me over the line.

Feels like there's a quiet little dev community forming around this thing and it's just starting to get interesting. Only stumbled onto RayDesk from a random YouTube sideload tutorial. Not sure what else people are running on these yet.

Hello r/SmartGlasses

We are Nimo. We believe that Smart Glasses should, first and foremost, be glasses. That is why the traditional shape of glasses was our starting point—from the front frame to the tip of the temples.

They weigh just 29 grams. Even with prescription lenses, the glasses stay incredibly light at only 35 grams. For us, all-day wearing comfort is completely non-negotiable.

Ask Us Anything about:

• Our design and hardware specifications
• The features in our own companion app
• Our partnership with Mentra (app ecosystem & developer SDK)
• How and when you can get them

Please drop your questions in the comments! We will start answering them today at 5 PM PT / 8 PM ET.

Giveaway: As a thank you to the community, we will raffle off a pair of our Nimo Glasses! Anyone who asks a question by the end of the day will be automatically entered into the giveaway. The prize will ship to the winner as soon as our mass production units are ready.

www.nimoar.com

These glasses are always with me every where I go, and I swear i didnt do this to some of my other glasses. Just so amazing even I have it inside I can still put some of my other stuff. I can just grab my bag and head out for work without thinking twice. And the best thing about it is i can easily connect to other devices. It’s one of those gadgets I don’t think about every day, but whenever I need it, I can have more screen time anytime I want.

We’re hard at work finishing up Nimbo’s 3DOF SDK. What further details would you guys like to know?

I can convert the GLB to a VRM and make Pikachu a movable avatar. Do you think if TCG did this, it will boosts the value of the collection?

Hey r/augmentedreality,

I work on the Nimbo X1 team — we’re a bunch of optical engineers, software devs, and AR nerds in HongKong who got tired of waiting for someone else to build the glasses we actually wanted to wear.

So in 2025 we just… started building them ourselves.

Nimbo X1 is now at the point where it’s fully designed and ready for production. We figured this was a good time to stop lurking and actually introduce ourselves.

We’re doing an AMA on August 20 5:00 PM PDT with our optics lead, systems guy, and me. Ask us about SiC waveguides, why we open-sourced the system signatures, manufacturing disasters, whatever. We will answer what we can. If we don’t know something, we will say so.

What we built, and why we went with SiC

The biggest decision we made was the optical stack. We ended up with a custom single-layer SiC waveguide. The idea was simple: get full-color AR from something thin enough that the glasses still look like glasses.

Most AR glasses use an RGB triple-layer glass waveguide. It works, but the stack ends up around 1.9 mm thick, and those layer interfaces are exactly where the front-facing rainbow fringing comes from.

SiC has a much higher refractive index than glass. That is what lets us do full-color in a single 0.7 mm layer — no RGB stack, no inter-layer fringing, and an optical engine that actually fits into a normal frame.

Sounds clean on paper. It was not clean in practice. Our first batch of SiC samples looked beautiful in the optical bench. Then we assembled them into actual glasses and the color uniformity fell apart. Some batches tested fine in isolation but behaved completely differently once they went through the full assembly process.

We went through something like 40 waveguide samples before we landed on an architecture that actually worked. The first 30 were basically unusable. There was a solid month where we thought we would have to give up on SiC entirely and go back to a conventional glass stack.

But we got there. Final design:

• 0.7 mm single-layer SiC
• 2000 nits
• No front-view rainbow
• 30° FOV

Yeah, 30° is not the widest. We know. We chose it on purpose — trading raw FOV for a form factor that we can actually wear for more than a demo. Whether that trade-off makes sense for you is something we genuinely want to hear.

Why We Chose an Open Platform

Another question we kept discussing internally was: What should developers actually be allowed to do with the hardware? As developers ourselves, we’ve always found it frustrating when experimentation stops at the application layer.

We also understand why consumer products often use more controlled software environments. It makes devices easier to support, improves consistency, and can make the experience much simpler for everyday users.

But for the kind of experimentation we wanted to encourage, we felt there was value in going further. So we decided to make Nimbo X1 as open as we reasonably could.

The platform includes:

• System-level signing access, allowing developers to sign and install their own system applications.
• SDK documentation covering the SiC waveguide display, 32MP camera, microphone array, IMU, and 3DOF tracking pipeline.
• Access to underlying hardware interfaces, including raw sensor streams rather than only higher-level APIs.
• Freedom to build your own systems and algorithms, including experimenting with your own 3DOF fusion or using IMU and camera data for your own spatial-computing projects.
• An independent App Center designed to make it easier for the community to share and iterate on applications.

We’re not sure yet what developers will ultimately do with this. That’s actually part of the point. If someone builds something with Nimbo that we never imagined, we’d consider that a success.

What Already Works Today

We also wanted Nimbo X1 to be useful out of the box, without requiring developers to build everything themselves. The glasses currently support:

• Real-time multilingual translation
• Navigation
• AI teleprompter
• Smart notification HUD
• Immersive video playback with a 90-inch-equivalent virtual screen, based on our current 30° FOV
• AI assistant
• 32MP AR camera
• AI-assisted coding in the AR view

These are features that are already working in the product today, rather than concepts for a future roadmap.

We want your honest take

We are not here to tell you we solved AR. We have not. We made a bunch of trade-offs and we are sure some of them will look wrong to people here.

So tell us what you think. If our SiC approach sounds dumb, say why. If you want to know something technical, ask. If you think 30° FOV is a dealbreaker, we will not argue — we will just want to know what you would have done differently.

We will be in the comments. See you at the AMA on August 20.

—  Nimbo team

kickstarter:

www.kickstarter.com/projects/nimbopearl/nimbo-x1-worlds-lightest-sic-color-display-ar-glasses

After many iterations of debugging, testing, and refining, I successfully built an MR Mario experience for Meta Quest. Mario can now walk out of the game screen into the real world, interact with physical space, collect coins, and return safely back into the screen.
This project taught me a lot about Unity, mixed reality interaction, hand tracking, native library integration, physics, and persistence through difficult bugs.
Really happy to see the idea become real.