Xreal, known for its high-end display-centric smart glasses, is making its gear more accessible. On Wednesday, the company revealed a new sub-brand—X By Xreal—focused on lightweight display glasses that start at $299.
Xreal is the Chinese tech company that makes screen-forward smart glasses. Its devices connect to a phone, desktop, or console and provide a display that beams large, high-quality video directly into the wearer’s eyeballs. The glasses are meant to provide a sharp, reasonably comfortable way to play games or watch movies on a big screen, without having to crane your neck down at a phone, laptop, or gaming handheld.
X By Xreal, or xbx for short, sounds a little like Microsoft’s popular gaming console, but Xreal thinks it’s different enough that the naming convention won’t draw Redmond’s ire. The first pair of glasses—the a01—look like they feature Xbox branding, with the xbx logo rendered along the frames in a bright yellow-green font that invites comparison.
The a01 are extra lightweight, weighing around 62 grams (0.14 pounds). Xreal says the displays have a perceived brightness of 1600 nits, with HDR10 support, an anti-shake mode to help keep the picture stable, and interchangeable frames. They’re designed to be comfy, wearable glasses for people to keep on their face, whether they are “lying in bed watching shows late at night or gaming with friends for long periods,” according to the company’s press release. Since they connect to a phone or laptop that does the bulk of the video processing, the glasses don’t require their own batteries.
Xreal’s main goal with its glasses is to win on wearability. Face computers have long struggled on that front. More powerful systems beget heftier cases, which are harder on faces. The big smart glasses manufacturers, like Meta and Google, are aiming to squeeze as many features as possible into their smart glasses while also keeping them mobile and comfy. Meta, which has done quite well on that front, has still struggled to keep its more powerful glasses from bulging out.
Xreal’s display glasses take a different route, focusing on more niche use cases of consuming content. They’re not designed to be worn while walking around, though the display’s high brightness and the chromatic dimming features mean they can be used outdoors. The a01 also supports Xreal’s Beam Pro, its Android device that enables three degrees of freedom (3DoF) tracking plus access to Google Play Store apps.
The new xbx a01 glasses come a week after we learned more about Xreal’s Project Aura glasses, which it’s developing in partnership with Google and Qualcomm. These glasses aim to slim down the traditionally heavy, boxy chassis usually found on mixed reality headsets—like Samsung’s Galaxy XR or the Apple Vision Pro—and pack that power into a battery-pack-supported but much lighter pair of glasses people might want to wear, hand tracking and all.
The a01 glasses are available in China, and the company says they will launch in the US in July. They cost $299, which is markedly cheaper than many of Xreal’s other glasses products.
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