I put on a pair of AR glasses to view a movie during a recent flight from Los Angeles to New York City. This wasn’t an experience with the Vision Pro or Meta Quest but rather the latest AR eyewear from Xreal, a Chinese startup focused on delivering a straightforward, effective product.

Pushing the limits of simplicity, the Xreal One will be available for preorder starting Wednesday for $499. While technically AR glasses that overlay graphics onto your field of view, their primary function is more akin to a display mirror for your smartphone, laptop, or gaming console. Despite this limited scope, the One’s significant display upgrades over Xreal’s previous Air 2 glasses make them a worthwhile contender.

These glasses utilize a custom birdbath lens system to simulate what the company describes as a 1080p display with a 50-degree field of view. In practice, this translates to a fairly immersive visual experience. Watching Rebel Ridge on Netflix during my flight was surprisingly engaging. While it doesn’t rival the immersive feel of the Vision Pro, the lightweight 84-gram frame and unobtrusive design were more than enough to compensate. Only during particularly dark scenes did the experience falter slightly due to pixelation in dark colors—a minor drawback but something to consider for fans of moody, visually dark films like Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.

For audio, Xreal has partnered with Bose to integrate high-quality speakers into the glasses, outperforming options like Meta’s Ray-Bans. However, I opted for my Sonos Ace headphones paired to my iPad, which had Rebel Ridge downloaded.

While the Xreal One glasses I tested were running on beta software, the reliance on a connected device via USB-C for screen mirroring stood out. Unlike the lofty and often disjointed ambitions of AR headsets from companies like Meta and Snap, Xreal has taken a more practical route. Instead of chasing broad and abstract AR concepts, they’ve honed in on the glasses’ potential as a simple, portable display.

Xreal’s CEO, Chi Xu, shared that the company has sold around half a million units since launching in 2017, with top use cases being entertainment at home and business travel. In a market full of ambitious but unfocused headsets, the Xreal One’s clear purpose and solid execution offer a refreshing take on what AR eyewear can be.

Topics #AR glasses #Eyewear #Glasses #news #TV #watching TV #Xreal