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CES in Las Vegas is one of the biggest tech shows in the world, and XR has had a regular spot there since 2013, when the Oculus Rift first turned heads. This year, 3D Council walked the floor at the 2025 edition, and here's what caught our attention.
While the Rift made quite a splash back in the day fresh off its Kickstarter success Meta has, interestingly enough, Never It had its own booth at CES. That said, Meta Quests were everywhere this year, powering VR experiences across countless other booths. That alone says a lot.
Meta Quest 3's Hand Tracking Opens Up New Professional Use Cases
HTC, Which for years hosted its own side event at the Wynn (a hotel just off the show floor), was also absent this time around. No Major Surprise There the TAiwanese manufacturer recently sold part of its engineering team To Google to Help Boost Android XR development.
Despite these absences, the XR was there in force, in particular through siemens Who announced the release at January 23rd of its solution designed in partnership with sony. The helmet Sony SRH-S1 is sold for 4750 dollars and is aimed exclusively at a professional use in business.
It is a wireless headset designed for 3D design, equipped with a resolution of 3552 × 3840 pixels by eye with micro-OLED screens That turn at 90 frames per second, 1000 nits of brightness and 96% coverage of the DCI-P3 color spectrum. It is equipped with front cameras for mixed reality experiences, but for more comfort the helmet can also be Easily picked up to go from working on a flat screen to an immersive view.
It is also equipped with two original controllers : a scoring system and a ring to navigate through the menus. We were able to test it and the system is interesting but requires time to adapt to easily navigate the experiences. It is obviously compatible basic with Siemens NX. At the same time, Sony announced XYN, a “prosumer” helmet that will be intended for creatives and seems to be based largely on the characteristics of the SRH-S1.
At the Central Hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center, it's the Japanese Shiftall who attracted attention with his MeganeX Superlight (pronounced “megané”, the word means glasses in Japanese). Ever heard of Shiftall? It's normal, it's a subsidiary of Panasonic born after several years of internal development.
The MeganeX Superlight has the advantage of being ultra-compact while incorporating the same screens Micro-OLED of 3552 × 3840 pixels per eye that the Sony SRH-S1 mentioned above. The height of luxury, The adjustment of the IPD is done automatically when you indicate your measurements. The downside of this superlight format: it cannot be used with glasses, and it requires a cable connection to a PC with an Nvidia graphics card as well as SteamVR tracking beacons. It will be sold stream Mars for about 1900 dollars.
On the side of controllers, Shiftall offers Steam controllers called GripVR which look like those in the Valve Index, but have buttons equivalent to those of Quest controllers (which have become the market standard). They will be sold separately for 300 dollars.
The company also announced AddCon, an accessory for left-handed Touch controllers Of Quest 3/3S/Pro. It adds a Wheel and buttons to extend the functionality of the controller, the objective being to facilitate the management of 2D user interface elements. It connects to the Quest via Bluetooth LE or a GX6/GX2 dongle and charges via its USB Type-C port. AddCon will be sold for 69 dollars and should be out this summer.
A regular at the lounge, the Chinese Pimax was there to promote its next SteamVR headset, the” Crystal Super ”, whose resolution is supposed to be 3840 x 3840 pixels per eye with a horizontal field of view of 120° and a luminosity of 280 nits. The device was not finalized and as always with Pimax you should be careful because the results rarely live up to the promises. Nevertheless, the manufacturer benefits from a loyal customer base, especially for the driving simulation.
Demonstrations were held with the Crystal Light, his current helmet, especially on the Next Level Racing stand. Other demonstrations using VR were also on the show, such as an arcade game or an immersive K-Pop video with Meta Quest 3 offered by the Korean conglomerate Lotte.
The Meta product that excited the crowds the most in 2024 was not a helmet but a pair of glasses: The Ray-Ban Meta. Without a screen but equipped with a camera, microphones and headphones discreet in the arms, these” Smart glasses ” allow you to pass calls, take pictures, listen to music or ask questions to an assistant based on generative AI. A glimpse of the future that seduced more than'A million buyers last year.
And who says success, says Imitations at CES. The copies were everywhere and were called Loomos (from the manufacturer Sharge), Rokid Glasses, Mustard Glasses or LAWK. With the exception of Mustard, an Indian start-up, all come from Chinese companies. Do they have a chance of really competing with Ray-Ban Meta? Probably not. But that's the CES game, where Product ads follow one after another sometimes without them ever seeing the light of day. In all cases, this reveals a infatuation for this product category.
For its part, Meta seems to be preparing his next glasses, which will be equipped with a small screen. Perhaps in a few years we will see again devices capable of See-through augmented reality, just like HoloLens 2 did.
Note that there were still a few pairs of glasses doing augmented reality in this way. The most popular were undoubtedly those of Xreal, a Chinese start-up that acts as Veteran on the show with a first appearance at CES 2019. She presented her new glasses: Xreal One and Xreal One Pro.
Like its previous products, it is glasses that act as a virtual screen : they only have one Tracking 3DoF and their field of 50° vision (57° for the One Pro) allows you to display a static screen equivalent to a 70-inch TV (85 inches for the One Pro) placed 2 meters away. Useful for entertain or work on the train or the plane. They work by connecting to a Windows PC or a smartphone Apple or Android.
We have Pre-ordered the Xreal One Pro And we will publish our impressions in the coming months!
Find our use cases for using XR technologies in training and marketing.
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