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The Xreal Air 2 Pro AR Glasses Are Cool but Frustrating

XReal Air 2 Pro AR glasses display crystal clear, high-def video in a pair of slightly oversized sunglasses. When you first put ’em on, you will likely be impressed, and imagine how much better every flight you’ll ever take in the future will be. But a deeper dive reveals problems with ease-of-use and a sometimes frustrating product that doesn’t live up to its potential.

XReal Air 2 Pro AR glasses

$399.00
at Amazon

A quick look at the Xreal Air 2 Pro

Pros:

Cons:

Xreal Air 2 Pro Specs

What is the Xreal Air 2 Pro?

On its website, Xreal describes its AR glasses as “One screen to replace them all.” The promise is a pair of shades you can slip on and use as the display for your game systems, computers, phones, tablets, and anything else with an HDMI port. Plus it has AR features. This would be very cool—if all of it worked right.

Xreal Air 2 Pro’s design: comfortable and solid

A lot of thought clearly went into how the Xreal 2 glasses fit and feel, and they pass the “how are they to actually wear?” test with flying colors. They’re lighter than you might think at only 75 grams, but still feel solid, and the flexible nose pieces distribute weight comfortably. They feel only slightly more bulky than a normal pair of sunglasses. Looks-wise, Xreals remind me of cheap sunglasses from CVS (ironic, since they cost $450). But judge for yourself:


Credit: Robyn Johnson

Xreal Air 2 Pro setup is easy

Xreal’s line of AR glasses includes four different configurations. For review, the company sent the Xreal Air 2 Pro bundle, reportedly its best-seller, which consists of a pair of AR glasses and a Beam Pro, a separate Android device that connects to the glasses through a USB-C cable. The Beam lets you run Android-compatible apps in your glasses and provides a touchscreen for navigation.

After running through a brief setup tutorial, I was able to download Netflix, Gmail, Prime, and more onto the Beam Pro, and get right to business. I downloaded Nurse 3D (an underrated flick) from Prime and got on a plane to Chicago to test this thing out.

Xreal Air 2 Pro’s video quality is impressive


Credit: Stephen Johnson

A long flight is the best-use scenario for this device. It displays a virtual screen that’s meant to look as large as a 330-inch monitor looks in real life. I don’t know how those real-to-virtual calculations are done, but when I slipped these glasses on, it felt like leaving the crowded airplane and watching a movie on a small screen at a theater where I was the only customer. As an added bonus, when you’re watching Nurse 3D, nosy fellow travelers cannot see your lowlife film choice. Stealthy!

The Xreal’s video is remarkably crisp, bright, and high-def, courtesy of two 1920×1080 OLED displays, one for each eyeball. It’s worlds better than the screen embedded in the seat in front of you on your flight, and rivals a decent television in terms of definition and brightness. But it’s not perfect.

Smaller screens work better than the gigantic ones—bigger screens on the Xreal tend to appear to have blurry corners or parts that you can’t see. This can be partially corrected by adjusting how the glasses fit on your face, so it was a minor problem for me, but that might be because I have average facial geometry. The precision needed for this kind of display to look perfect means that some users might have bigger problems getting it to “look right.”

The sound is decent—nothing to write home about, but great for speakers embedded in eyeglasses. That said, it may be loud enough to use at home or on a bus, but it’s too quiet for an airplane. Thankfully, you can easily pair up some Bluetooth headphones for flights.

The Xreal’s display can be oriented as either a fixed screen or in “follow” mode that will move around with your head. I use the fixed version most often, but as an experiment, I did laundry while watching a movie, and follow mode worked great for that.

While I found the Xreal glasses comfortable enough to wear for a few hours in terms of my face, the experience can be draining on the eyes. I’m not sure what’s going on physically when your eyeballs are blasted with bright light from a source that’s about an inch from your retinas, but the result, for me at least, was often a headache and eyestrain with longer use. That said, this is par for the course for me with any kind of virtual reality; some people can tolerate it better.

Using the Xreal Air 2 Pro as an Android device


Credit: Stephen Johnson

When you’re not watching movies, you can download and run Android apps with your Xreal Air 2 Pro. You can check your email, play some games, and do whatever else you would normally do, except now you can do it in windows floating around the room. The Beam 2 device works as a spatial mouse, so you can point it at apps to interact with them. There’s also a touchscreen, so you can type on an actual surface instead of laboriously pecking out letters in AR/VR like you do with some devices. All of this works really well.

The downside of the Xreal Air 2 Pro: everything else

If the purpose of the Xreal Pro 2 Air was to watch movies and use apps through a dedicated Android device, it would be a home run, but the device has loftier ambitions, and that’s where it falls short. The device doesn’t fully deliver on its parent company’s promise of “one screen to replace them all,” and its AR capabilities aren’t particularly compelling.

Xreal Air 2 Pro’s AR and Nebula

The Xreal promises an augmented reality experience and 3D applications and gaming. To make that happen, it comes with a program called Nebula that runs on top of Android on the Beam pro. It’s buggy, confusing, and crashes fairly frequently. It’s also unnecessary, especially given the anemic offerings at the dedicated Nebula storefront. There are a couple of AR games (tech demos, really), a version of Netflix, Prime, and Disney+, and a couple of utilities. That’s it. While the floating windows of Nebula are kind of cool and there’s a suggestion that it could be used for an interesting, “augmented” way of interacting with a computer, in its current state, Nebula feels half-baked and unfinished, and it could have been left out entirely.

Xreal Air 2 Pro for console gaming

Some gamers love the Xreal: it apparently works great to stream Steam games from a PC, for instance. But I’m a console gamer, so I wanted to try it out with my Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series X. But I couldn’t. Doing that requires an Xreal Adapter for wireless streaming, a $50 device that doesn’t come in the Pro 2 bundle. I can’t buy one, either, as they’re currently sold out. So maybe it’s great; I have no way of knowing.

Xreal Air 2 Pro as a MacBook monitor


Credit: Stephen Johnson

You can use an Air 2 Pro as a display for a PC or Mac. I have a MacBook, which you can hook up either using the screen mirroring option or by connecting the glasses and computer together directly with a USB-C cable. Directly connecting works great, but isn’t very useful. It’s cool to have your Mac screen floating freely in front of you, but you’re wired to it anyway, so what’s the point?

Screen mirroring lets you see your computer screen in your glasses, but you can’t interact with it using the Xreal’s virtual mouse, so that’s not particularly useful either. There might be a workaround for this, but if there is, I wasn’t able to figure it out, which highlights how frustrating this device can be. Tinkerers might like the problem-solving aspect, but I just want things to work.

Xreal Air 2 Pro as a monitor for a phone

If you want to connect your Xreal to a compatible Android phone, a direct-connected USB-C cable does it, but that doesn’t offer much more than the Beam device that comes with an Xreal Air 2 Pro. With one exception: the ability to make phone calls. Though the Beam is the size of Android phone, looks like Android phone, and runs the same apps as an Android phone, you can’t make calls with it.

Things are a little more complicated over on iPhone. Newer iPhones have a USB-C port, so, in theory, it should connect the same as on Android. But if you have an iPhone with a Lightning port, you’ll need Xreal’s Lightning adapter to connect. If you don’t have the adapter (I do not), this leaves you with screen-mirroring and AirPlay, which means you’ll still need your phone to input anything. Because the Xreal Air 2 Pro already comes with a phone-like device, I didn’t find a real use for screen-mirroring my iPhone.

Overall: Xreal Air 2 Pro is great for frequent flyers and early adopters, less great for everyone else

While there are several issues with the ease of use of many of the Xreal Air 2 Pro’s features, the “wow” factor is real. This level of video quality from a pair of sunglasses is crazy impressive, and if you put these on the face of someone who hasn’t used AR glasses before, they’re going to feel like Roddy Piper in They Live (without the aliens). But on a deeper level, there are some serious problems here in terms of ease of use. The Air 2 Pro doesn’t feel finished.

It’s great for watching movies on long flights and impressing your friends, but that’s all you’ll probably use it for—unless you’re the kind of person who enjoys the effort of workarounds and hunting down adapters. If you’re like me, though, and your idea of good tech is easy integration with minimal headaches, you will likely be disappointed.

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