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The glasses serve various purposes, with some using XR to create a portable desktop setup, and others competing with Meta's Ray-Bans, which pack cameras and voice assistants into a lightweight form factor. ZDNET's smart glasses experts have either covered the news or gone hands-on with many of them.
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Now that 2026 is no longer speculative but real, Metropolis invites a fresh look. It captured structural tensions that continue to shape modern urban life: who benefits from progress, who pays for it, and how technology changes human relationships when power is concentrated at the top.
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Prices will start from 1,899 yuan ($268.25) for the headset that will be powered by Alibaba's Qwen AI model and app. Unlike other headsets made by the likes of Meta, the Quark glasses look like regular eyewear, with a black plastic frame. Alibaba said the glasses would be deeply integrated with its apps, including Alipay and its shopping site Taobao, with wearers able to use them for tasks such as on-the-go translation and instant price recognition.
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Today, we’re introducing WorldGen: a state-of-the-art end-to-end system for generating interactive and navigable 3D worlds from a single text prompt. WorldGen is built on a combination of procedural reasoning, diffusion-based 3D generation, and object-aware scene decomposition. The result is geometrically consistent, visually rich, and render-efficient 3D worlds for gaming, simulation, and immersive social environments.
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In the last hundred years, humanity’s capacity for knowledge transmission progressed from the written word and the static-laden echoes of early radio technology to global information systems so vast and complex that no single person on Earth can claim a complete understanding of them. Inevitably, the social technologies built into both our biology and our society are no longer entirely capable of addressing our new epistemological landscape. But is a slow retreat into the machine necessarily the only path we can take to keep up?
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Notably, the platform doesn’t require coding or advanced design expertise, allowing users to design, drop, and share interactive AR experiences across mobile devices, headsets, and AR glasses.
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If you’ve encountered any science fiction, you’ve experienced the technological sublime—the feeling of awe, braided with dread, that can emerge in response to the engulfing possibilities of technology’s progress. Maybe you’ve gaped at the sprawling cyber-cityscapes of “Blade Runner,” or at the impossibly tall, leaflike alien ships in “Arrival.” In the cascading green code of “The Matrix,” you might have sensed a promise of revelation—or perhaps Ava, the uncannily beautiful android played by Alicia Vikander in “Ex Machina,” has induced some idea of what it might mean to be more than human. In all of these cases, technology feels big, strange, relentless, but also mind-expanding and appealing—a bracing wave that will sweep you up.
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“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”
Winston Churchill originally delivered this line in reference to the rebuilding of the House of Commons, which had been destroyed in a Nazi air raid in 1941. With it, he hoped to persuade Parliament to rebuild the bombed-out building exactly as it was — or in his words, to restore “its old form, convenience and dignity.”
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Virilio’s claim that teletechnologies “kill the present” is more than a provocation. For him the present is not a neutral slice of time but the lived conjunction of here and now. When signals are detached from place and relayed across fiber and satellite, the present is hollowed out and replaced by what he calls telepresence. What appears as connection is in fact a form of absence, since presence is stripped from its site and converted into circulation. This marks the passage from the infrastructure of real space, built with ports, streets, and walls, to the infrastructure of real time, organized through terminals, relays, and sensors.
In this environment the city no longer ends at its walls or highways. Its final boundary is the terminal, the screen, the input device. The citizen’s last street is the skin, the nervous system, the point of entry for signals that fold perception into the circuit of control. The body becomes the last urban surface, saturated with interfaces that mediate and redirect every sensation.
Virilio names the result a stereo-world. Reality is divided into two overlapping layers that never fully align: presence and telepresence, optics and optoelectronics, touch and teletactility. Each sense is doubled by its prosthetic substitute. Each doubling disrupts the orienting function of the horizon, that line which once anchored vision and grounded the body in space. Instead of orientation we receive simulation, a mediated echo of experience that dislocates perception from environment.
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You don’t have to look far to find reports of people who have used VR headsets and then felt ‘off’ after removing them. While motion sickness is surely the most well-known post-VR symptom, a subset of people say they have experienced feelings of being ‘stuck in VR’ after taking off their headsets. It’s tempting to brush off such reports as someone having seen The Matrix (1999) one too many times, but it turns out there is a clear scientific basis for the sensation.
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