Xreal Air 2 Pro AR Glasses Are Cool, but Disappointing
The XReal Air 2 Pro augmented reality glasses deliver crystal-clear, high-definition video in slightly larger sunglasses. When you first put them on, you’ll likely be impressed and imagine how much better every flight you’ll ever take in the future will be. But a deeper dive reveals ease of use issues and a sometimes disappointing product that doesn’t live up to its potential.
A quick look at the Xreal Air 2 Pro
Pros:
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Very impressive display
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Comfortable
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Ideal for travel
Cons:
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Additional carrying item
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AR capabilities are disappointing
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Integration with other devices is often difficult.
Xreal Air 2 Pro Specifications
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148 mm × 51.4 mm × 161 mm
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Weight: 75 grams
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Field of view: 46 degrees
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Screen: 0.55-inch Micro-OLED panel from Sony.
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Resolution: 1920×1080 per eye
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Brightness: up to 500 nits
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Refresh rate: up to 120Hz
What is 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 glasses that you can wear and use as a display for your gaming systems, computers, phones, tablets, and anything else with an HDMI port. Plus it has AR features. This would be very cool if everything worked correctly.
Xreal Air 2 Pro Design: Comfortable and Durable
A lot of thought has been put into how the Xreal 2 glasses fit and feel, and they go along with the question of “how do you actually wear them?” test with flying colors. They’re lighter than you’d think, at just 75 grams, but still feel durable, with flexible nose pieces that distribute the weight comfortably. They feel just a little bulkier than regular sunglasses. The look of the Xreals reminds me of cheap sunglasses from CVS (ironic since they cost $450). But judge for yourself:
Setting up Xreal Air 2 Pro is easy
The Xreal line of AR glasses includes four different configurations. The company sent us the Xreal Air 2 Pro kit for review, which is reportedly its best seller and consists of a pair of AR glasses and Beam Pro, a separate Android device that connects to the glasses via a USB-C cable. Beam lets you run Android-compatible apps on your glasses and features a touchscreen for navigation.
After going through a quick setup guide, I was able to load Netflix, Gmail, Prime, and other services onto the Beam Pro and get started right away. I downloaded Nurse 3D (an underrated movie) from Prime and got on a plane to Chicago to try this thing out.
The video quality of the Xreal Air 2 Pro is impressive.
A long flight is the best scenario for using this device. It displays a virtual screen that is supposed to look as big as a 330-inch monitor in real life. I don’t know how these real and virtual calculations work, but when I put on these glasses, I felt like I was stepping off a crowded plane and watching a movie on the small screen in a theater where I was the only person in attendance. As an added bonus, when you watch Nurse 3D, curious fellow travelers won’t be able to see your chosen poverty-stricken movie. Secretly!
Xreal video is amazingly clear, bright and high-resolution thanks to two 1920×1080 OLED displays, one for each eyeball. It’s much better than the screen built into the seat in front of you on a flight, and rivals a decent TV in terms of clarity and brightness. But it’s not ideal.
Smaller screens perform better than giant ones: on larger Xreal screens, corners or parts you can’t see tend to appear blurry. This can be partially corrected by adjusting the fit of the glasses on the face, so this was a minor issue for me, but it may be due to the fact that I have average facial geometry. The precision required to make such a display look perfect means that some users may have more trouble getting it to ‘look right’.
The sound is decent – nothing special, but great for the speakers built into the glasses. However, it may be loud enough to use at home or on the bus, but too quiet for an airplane. Luckily, you can easily connect Bluetooth headphones for flights.
The Xreal display can be oriented either as a fixed screen or in a “follow” mode, which moves with your head. Most often I use the fixed version, but as an experiment I erased while watching a movie, and the follow mode was perfect for this.
While I found the Xreal glasses comfortable enough to wear for several hours in terms of my face, the experience can be tiring on the eyes. I’m not sure what happens physically when your eyeballs are illuminated by bright light from a source about an inch from your retina, but the result, at least for me, with long-term use was often headaches and eye fatigue. However, for me this is a normal occurrence in any virtual reality; some people may tolerate it better.
Using Xreal Air 2 Pro as an Android Device
When you’re not watching movies, you can download and run Android apps using the Xreal Air 2 Pro. You can check your email, play some games, and do everything you normally do, but now you can do it in windows floating around the room. The Beam 2 works like a spatial mouse, so you can point it at and interact with apps. There’s also a touchscreen so you can type on a real surface instead of painstakingly tracing letters into AR/VR like you do on some devices. It all works very well.
Cons of Xreal Air 2 Pro: Everything else
If the Xreal Pro 2 Air’s purpose was to watch movies and use apps through a dedicated Android device, it would be ideal, but the device has loftier ambitions, and that’s where it falls short. The device doesn’t quite deliver on its parent company’s “one screen to replace them all” promise, and its AR capabilities aren’t particularly compelling.
AR and Nebula Xreal Air 2 Pro
Xreal promises augmented reality capabilities, 3D apps and games. To make this happen, it comes with Nebula software that runs on top of Android on the Beam pro. It’s glitchy, confusing, and crashes quite often. It’s also unnecessary, especially given the anemic offerings at the Nebula specialty store. There are a couple of AR games (tech demos, really), a version of Netflix, Prime and Disney+, and a couple of utilities. That’s all. While Nebula’s floating windows are cool, and there’s speculation that they could be used for an interesting, “enhanced” way to interact with your computer, in its current state, Nebula feels half-baked and unfinished, and could have been scrapped entirely.
Xreal Air 2 Pro for console gaming
Some gamers like Xreal: it apparently works great for streaming Steam games from a PC, for example . But I’m a console gamer, so I wanted to try this on my Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series X. But I couldn’t.This requires the Xreal Wireless Streaming Adapter, a $50 device that’s not included with the Pro 2. I can’t buy those either, as they’re currently sold out . So maybe that’s great; I have no way of knowing.
Xreal Air 2 Pro as a MacBook monitor
You can use the Air 2 Pro as a display for your PC or Mac. I have a MacBook that can be connected either using the screen mirroring feature or by connecting the glasses and computer directly using a USB-C cable. Direct connection works fine, but is useless. It’s cool to have your Mac’s screen floating freely in front of you, but you’re still connected to it, so what’s the point?
Screen mirroring allows you to see your computer screen with the glasses on, but you can’t interact with it using the Xreal virtual mouse, so it’s not particularly useful either. There may be a workaround for this issue, but if there is, I haven’t been able to figure it out, which highlights how frustrating this device can be. DMs might like the problem solving aspect, but I just want things to work.
Xreal Air 2 Pro as a phone monitor
If you want to connect the Xreal to a compatible Android phone, you can use a direct-attach USB-C cable to do so, but it doesn’t offer much more than the Beam device that comes bundled with the Xreal Air 2 Pro. With one exception: the ability to make phone calls. Although the Beam is the size of an Android phone, looks like an Android phone, and uses the same apps as an Android phone, it can’t make calls.
On the iPhone things are a little more complicated. New iPhones have a USB-C port, so in theory it should connect just like Android. But if you have an iPhone with a Lightning port, you’ll need a Lightning Xreal adapter to connect . If you don’t have an adapter (I don’t), you’ll be left with screen mirroring and AirPlay, which means you’ll still need your phone to input anything. Since the Xreal Air 2 Pro already comes with a phone-like device, I haven’t found any real use for mirroring my iPhone’s screen.
Overall: The Xreal Air 2 Pro is great for frequent fliers and newbies, but less good for everyone else.
While there are a few issues with the ease of use of many of the Xreal Air 2 Pro’s features, the wow factor is very much there. This level of video quality in the sunglasses is insanely impressive, and if you put them on the face of someone who hasn’t used AR glasses before, they’ll feel like Roddy Piper in They Live (minus the aliens). . But on a deeper level, there are some serious issues 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 likes workarounds and hunting down adapters. However, if you’re like me and think good technology is simple integration with minimal headaches, you’ll likely be disappointed.