The 5 coolest gadget innovations of 2025
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Deep down, we want to be cyborgs. We spend an enormous amount of time interacting with technology every day, but the friction created by devices and interfaces persists. This year, we’ve come closer than ever to truly reality-augmenting technology. Meta has pushed its smart glasses beyond its beginnings as a simple content creation tool. The rest of the innovations run the gamut, from a drone that captures aerial images in a new way to a large platform designed to help AI systems navigate the physical world. Ultimately, all of these devices are designed to help humans do more of the things humans already love to do. This is how it should be.
(Editor’s note: This is a section of Popular Science’s 38th annual Best of What’s New awards. Be sure to read the full list of the 50 biggest innovations of 2025.)
Grand Prize Winner, Gadgets
Meta Ray-Ban Display and Neural Band smart glasses: the first true computer for the face
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Meta’s Ray-Ban Display and Neural Band glasses represent the first successful attempt to make “face computing” look like an actionable tool rather than a demonstration. A small screen in the right lens overlays simple interfaces, captions, directions, and AI responses into your field of vision, while the built-in microphones, speakers, and camera handle audio and capture in the background. The companion bracelet reads small electrical signals from the muscles in your forearm so that subtle finger movements act like clicks and scrolls, instead of relying on loud voice commands or sweeping gestures in the air. Near-to-eye display, on-body sensing, and assistant-like software fit into familiar-looking frames in a way that makes them feel like they could exist in the real world. It makes routine tasks (translation, navigation, quick queries) possible without taking out the phone, while forcing new conversations about what it means to have nearly invisible cameras and always-on AI in social spaces.
Cosmos by Nvidia: a “world model” stack for physical AI
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Cosmos is Nvidia’s toolkit for AI systems that need to deal with the physical world, like robots and autonomous vehicles. Video models can generate realistic scenes and short “futures” so machines can practice simulation, while data tools clean and search huge logs of real-world sensor recordings for specific situations. Instead of each developer creating their own patchwork of simulators and datasets, Cosmos offers a shared set of models and utilities tailored to Nvidia’s robotics and computing platforms.
More and more infrastructure and logistics are being handed over to automated systems, which need reliable ways to learn about rare or dangerous edge cases without causing real harm. If platforms like Cosmos work as intended, they make it easier to prototype and test these systems in synthetic worlds before they interact with real streets, warehouses, and people.
Antigravity A1 by Insta360: A 360-degree drone for a first photo flight
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Antigravity’s first drone, developed with action camera maker Insta360, is built around a 360-degree camera instead of a forward-facing one. Rather than aiming at a single objective during flight, the drone records everything around it; you decide the framing later during editing, transforming the same flight into wide landscape shots, vertical clips, or immersive vistas. By separating “flying” from “camera work,” it lowers the skill barrier for obtaining usable aerial footage and gives experienced pilots more flexibility in restricted or unpredictable environments. This is a rare case in which a product significantly reduces the learning curve for beginners while significantly expanding the creative options for experienced users.
Pioneer Na by BLUETTI: A sodium-ion power plant that operates in extreme cold
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The BLUETTI Pioneer Na portable power station replaces common lithium-based cells with sodium-ion batteries. Sodium-ion packs generally store slightly less energy per kilogram but offer several important improvements. For users, sodium cells can charge and discharge in cold weather, where many lithium units stall charging or lose much of their effective capacity. Cold tolerance is important for cabins, unheated garages, winter storms and field work in colder regions, where backup power often fails when it is needed most. As a consumer product, Pioneer Na demonstrates how sodium-ion chemistry is moving from laboratory prototypes to real devices, suggesting a future mix of storage technologies instead of a single, lithium-only pathway. Sodium-based cells are constructed from much more abundant raw materials than their traditional competitors.
UV Printer E1 by Eufy: A desktop UV printer that adds texture to objects
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The eufyMake UV Printer E1 is a compact UV printer intended for objects, not paper. It uses UV-curable inks and repeated passes to create millimeters of raised texture on plastics, metals, glass and other materials, which are handled by media that can hold flat panels, bottles and long flexible parts in the same machine. Alignment lasers, an onboard camera and automatic print head cleaning are there to keep this process predictable rather than complicated. Reducing this type of textured, multi-material printing to a desktop footprint allows small shops and serious hobbyists to produce countless artistic and practical projects.
PopSci Outdoor Gift Guide 2025
