Lynx

Stan Larroque founded Lynx in 2015 in France with the thesis that mixed reality would become the next major computing platform and that an open, Android-based headset could serve developers and enterprises that didn't want to be locked into a single ecosystem. The company spent its early years in R&D, designing a proprietary optical system that used a free-form prism and folded light path — a departure from the pancake and Fresnel lenses dominating the market.

In October 2020, Lynx launched a Kickstarter campaign for the R-1 that raised roughly €800,000 from over 1,000 backers. The campaign promised a standalone headset with color passthrough, hand tracking, and full Android app compatibility at a price point well below enterprise MR headsets of the era. The strong crowdfunding response signaled real demand for an open mixed-reality platform outside of Facebook's orbit.

The R-1's original ship date slipped repeatedly — from 2021 into 2022 and then 2023 — as global semiconductor shortages and pandemic supply-chain disruptions hammered a small company with no leverage over component suppliers. By the time units began reaching backers in late 2022 and early 2023, Meta had already shipped the Quest Pro and announced the Quest 3, while Apple's Vision Pro loomed on the horizon, each offering heavily subsidized hardware that Lynx could not match on price or polish.