philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Xreal One Smart Glasses Have Entered the Vision Pro Zone, and I Wore Them

Perching a pair of tethered glasses over my own lenses in an office in midtown New York, I see a familiar sight: Floating in front of me is a widescreen Mac monitor. It's just there, hovering in space. I move my head around to take in its size. Ironically, I'm not using a Vision Pro headset to do this. Instead, I'm wearing Xreal's newest glasses, which can cast larger displays and pin them in space, and it works with any device -- laptop, phone, game console -- that can output video via USB-C. ...

How do they do this? The Xreal One and Xreal One Pro glasses -- coming Dec. 9 and early next year, respectively -- have a chip called the X1, custom-made by Xreal, that can keep images fixed in space as you turn your head. These new glasses also have enhanced audio by Bose, a 50- or 57-degree field of view and optional AI-ready snap-in cameras. The Xreal One sounds smarter than Xreal's previous smart glasses. That's exactly the idea. ...

"We made these glasses with 80% of the experience, but at only 20% of their cost in terms of price, weight, everything," Chi says in an exclusive interview. ...

But the best and subtlest part is how displays can gradually move with you or stay fixed in one place. Xreal previously required a separate piece of hardware to get that anchored display to work, the Beam or Beam Pro; now, it's built into the glasses and works with anything -- from PCs and Macs to Steam Decks, tablets and phones. ...

See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/i-wore-xreal-one-smart-glasses-are-entering-the-vision-pro-zone/