I expect I will own one eventually, but I haven’t decided how much I’m willing to spend yet. I see these XREAL display glasses as a test case to see if the concept will work for me. Pretty sure it will be at least a year before I’ll be switching to the Apple headset. Maybe two. But we’ll see.
Edit: I had yet to see a summary of the Keynote when I wrote the above (I didn’t watch). Hahahaha. $3500 for the retail version next year? Okay, I have decided how much I’m willing to pay and this is not it.
The prescription lenses arrived and to celebrate my first real use of any glasses of this type I’m watching Ready Player One on the Tubi app streaming via USB-C DP Alt from my iPad mini 6.
I’m on a break after the first half hour (the first commercial appeared). The glasses felt fine, no discomfort or anything, but my eyes and face feel weird now that the glasses are removed. No pain or headache, more like a stretching. Never felt this before. I shall assume/hope it’s something that goes away after getting used to it.
Otherwise,
Edit: the second, longer session with movie produced no “stretching” feeling or other side effects. It looked and felt great. The audio from the arms was acceptable for a movie though of course my Bose QC 35 II over-the-ear cans were significantly better and offered ANC.
First day verdict: as good as I had hoped for and expected from display glasses. I can understand now why they’re so popular. Not for videophiles who turn up their noses at anything below 4k HDR with a thousand nits and perfect color. Don’t even bother. For those who know what these are intended to be, and are okay with that, they’re great! Do your homework first.
Most information I’ve been able to find comments on the glasses as entertainment devices, which is fair enough (and maybe their main appeal).
Have you used the glasses for productivity at all? I’m wondering whether they might be worthwhile as a bigger screen for writing in an editor, working with larg-ish tables and such, when sitting on a longer train journey for instance (or staying for a couple of days at a place where I’ve got no big monitor, just my 10 inch laptop screen). From your experience, would this be feasible in principle or is it too unpractical in your opinion?
Found one or two videos briefly commenting on related issues, but would appreciate some feedback from an actual (at least short-time) user.
It really depends on the person. I have tried writing in Ulysses on my Mac while wearing the glasses and it certainly works but it’s a different experience. You can’t easily see the keyboard so I’d say it’s for touch-typists only (which I am). And it also takes some getting used to to have the monitor move with your head. The Nebula app on the Mac will hold the monitor in a fixed position but it’s still beta and unlike just plugging it in as a monitor it has fuzzy text.
TLDR—the jury is still out, for me, when it comes to productivity.
But it’s great for videos on my iPad mini 6 and especially for games on my Steam Deck! Although those are awaiting an adapter so I can power them at the same time I’m playing. Otherwise the Steam Deck only lasts maybe an hour and a half, which goes very fast when I get involved with the game. (My mini can go hours watching movies with the XREAL, so not as important.) The adapter is supposed to arrive today, yay!
Maybe it’s William Gibson’s influence from some of his books I read 20 years ago, but I love the idea of AR/VR glasses as the only display connected to a computer that is just a keyboard, like a laptop without a screen. I may have mentioned this before, but I feel like something like my Kinesis split keyboard, even though it’s fairly large, would be portable enough if it had the motherboard, battery, etc in it and just connected to some AR/VR glasses or goggles. I can set each side of the split on each leg pretty comfortably and type away pretty well. Just needs a Lenovo style trackpoint for the cursor.
I just discovered that iPads prioritize USB-C audio ahead of Bluetooth headphones and there’s no way to change that in settings. So I’m stuck with the XReal glasses’ speakers.
With the Steam Deck you can go into settings to prioritize headphone jack ahead of the USB-C audio just fine: change from “default (speakers)” to “speakers”. For Bluetooth just select the name of the BT audio device. So I can listen to audio with my Bose QC 35 II headphones either plugged in the headphone jack or via BT.
The RedMagic USB-C powered DP adapter has a headphone jack:
It was cheaper at the time by $20 and it doesn’t block the Steam Deck power button and a few vents like the RedMagic one does. You can’t win. I’ll have to buy the RedMagic adapter too. :vb-doh:
I’ve only used the XReals on trips where I do not want to bring a laptop and want my packing to be minimal. In this case, I use them with Dex on my phone, just to do some light office work and conference calls. I can do some light coding, and manipulate Office (Word, PPT, Excel) documents. But it’s more of a “get by” solution, with the limitations in mobile Office 365 and in Dex itself (i.e. awful cut and paste fuctionality). If you’re using just Dex on the road, I definitely prefer the XReals vs a plug-in USB monitor, as the XReals are far more portable and are great to use on long plane flights.
Personally, I don’t use the XReals as a permanent productivity solution. I just feel a lot more productive on a laptop with 2nd monitor. It’s hard to explain and perhaps subtle, but I feel like looking at an actual monitor feels more natural. And I feel less “restrained”, like when I move around or step away, I don’t have to remove glasses and wires from myself.
Using an external keyboard doesn’t bother me much on the XReals. The screen overlay is like the top 2/3 of the glasses lens, so you can peek at the keyboard by keeping your head up and casting your gaze downward. It takes some getting used to, but it works fine for me.
To keep my cables more manageable, I use a power/displace splitter called Rokid Hub:
I looked into a Red Magic splitter, but what I like about the Rokid is there is no 3rd cord because the Hub plugs straight into my phone for Dex(fyi, I don’t think this works on game devices). So, it just feels like there is less of a cord mess.
There is no headphone jack, but I prefer a bluetooth earbud anyway to minimize cables.
Unfortunately, as I badly described above, an iPad will prioritize Xreal USB-C audio over BT on an iPad so there’s no way to use Bluetooth audio with the glasses plugged in. The only way to use audio output other than the speakers on the Air arms for an iPad is to use the headphone jack on an adapter like the RedMagic (which is unique to having that feature as far as I know). Sucks but it is what it is.
I’m liking them so far, but I think I’m mostly going to use them for entertainment. Reading text on them is a little tiring, at laptop distances they are more like 15"-24", and the colour is a quite warm. They also get warm at the bridge.
There isn’t any silicon grommet on it, pretty much a solid piece that fits well with my folded Fold3.
This entire week I’m experimenting with a truly PocketPC laptop-free roadtrip experience using the Airs, Fold3, MS Foldable keyboard, and Capclip mouse. It was delightful to have such a lightweight backpack.
So far its going well, as I can still catch up with work and personal tasks. I can still perform 3D modeling using Moonlight remoted to my GPU desktop at home.
The downsides so far… Dex still has limitations. And I still feel self conscious sitting out in public wearing these “sunglasses” typing on a keyboard without a laptop.
Following up on the Nubia RedMagic Adapter. I received mine today and it works perfectly to supply power to my iPad mini 6 while relaying DP Alt video to the Xreal glasses and audio to my Bose headphones over its audio jack.
The headphones need to be plugged into the audio jack last, after the glasses are connected. Last audio device wins, apparently.
It’s dongle h*ll, but the nearest thing to a home theatre I’ll ever get in my 22’ motorhome.
Well, I’ve had the Rokid Max for about a month now and I’m not very impressed.
Don’t get me wrong; there’s potential there but many of the issues it has are hardware ones that a revised hardware version would only fix.
The touted colour accuracy is a lie. Whites are rather warm for me, and vibrant colours are completely overblown. It’s not good. Changing the brightness does change the temperature of the display, but that isn’t much use.
The nose bridge gets uncomfortably warm. They are still wearable, but it isn’t nice.
The worst part is that the ‘viewport’ is far too tight/narrow. You can get the whole ‘display’ to fit into view, but then the lower outer corners are extremely close to the visible frame. This makes it very distracting as the outside world rarely provides good contrast. I think that the XReal Airs with their squarer frames do a better job with this.
So overall, the Rokid Maxes are good and do work as HMDs. But I would not advise buying them.
It’s a near thing on my Xreal Airs, but I think the prescription lens inserts make it harder to get the display in the right place. Once I have things adjusted it’s fine for me. I have seen posts from owners who returned them because one or another of the display edges were blurry or not fully in view, however, so it surely varies depending upon the person.
I received my Xreal Beam order. It removes all field of view issues since I can now set the screen size and distance, from 95 to 330 inch diagonal and 4 thru 10 meters away. The Smooth Follow mode gets rid of all jitters when your head moves—I can bounce on my toes and it’s rock steady—it will smoothly move to where you’re facing after a delay. Hard to describe how nicely it’s done.
Anchored mode is also nice. I was just watching a movie with the screen fixed up towards the ceiling, 250” @ 10 meters, while reclining on the couch. Sweet.
They need to work on the audio lag. It’s not noticeable in animated lip syncs but in live action video it definitely is. Using headphones, BT or wired, has no lag.
Wireless, Miracast or Airplay, won’t work with DRM content. They’re trying to get approval for it.
Early days. It can only improve and it’s already well worth the money for me.
I know I mentioned elsewhere (Apple Vision topic? Or maybe it was on Reddit) that I get some blurring and “sparkling” when using these with my Mac mini. Unfortunately the Beam accessory doesn’t change it at all that I can tell. The glasses are not usable for me on that device, not even playing a game.
I got the Xreal Air glasses recently (unfortunately the only way to get them in Europe is via unofficial ways like aliexpress, so I really hope I don’t need warranty).
So far, I’m really impressed. I’ve used the device to watch some stuff in the morning during breakfast and while tidying up the kitchen (running via Samsung Dex, so the mobile display was off for battery saving), which was quite nice. But now I also had two chances to use them for work while traveling on trains (essentially writing/editing LaTeX, a little bit of R and some editing in larg-ish tables using libreoffice) and it’s been impressively useful for me!
The level of helpfulness might be increased by the fact that my laptop display is just 10 inch, so the difference is really big. In principle I could even use a dual screen setup this way, although I just turned off the laptop display for extra battery saving.
An added bonus is that I don’t have to bend down my head to look down at the laptop (something that would be an issue even if I were using a note regular sized 13-15 inch display).
This probably wouldn’t replace my stationary 35 inch monitor, but while traveling it staying at a place temporarily this is a really great option. I haven’t productively used mobile monitors, so I can’t give a really fair comparison, but I think I’d prefer the glasses to taking a mobile display in terms of weight and versatility of use.
Due to the same lack of access outside of China, Japan and US, I haven’t been able to try out the Beam, but I’m curious about that further down the line. As it is, I’m quite happy I took the jump to get the device reverb just as a plain dumb display.
When you are using the glasses in AR mode like this, how is the contrast of the projected screen? Enough to read say a news ticker? Does it work in a sunny room too?
