Xreal, a leader in consumer augmented reality (AR) glasses, will start selling its Xreal One Pro, the company’s most advanced AR glasses yet, beginning July 1.
Xreal is finishing deliveries for its more than 10,000 pre-orders of Xreal One Pro and is offering special pre-order pricing through the end of June. I’ve tried it out and have had some novel experiences using it.
Built for power users, creators, and productivity seekers, Xreal One Pro features the industry’s largest field of view (FOV) in consumer AR at 57 degrees, ultra-thin lenses, and a re-engineered optical system that dramatically reduces overall size and ambient light interference.
Compared to Xreal One, the One Pro model delivers a brighter, sharper, and more immersive viewing experience, all while maintaining a sleeker form factor and the plug-and-play convenience that made the One Series a category standout. Xreal One Pro features new flat prism lenses that are 44% thinner than previous triangular birdbath lenses and produce a nearly 15% larger FOV.
“Xreal leads the market in XR display glasses, and the new One Pro takes everything the company has learned and puts a huge widescreen private display into a lightweight, highly portable package,” said Avi Greengart, president of research and advisory firm Techsponential, in a statement. “The custom X1 silicon allows the One Pro’s virtual display to stay anchored in space — or it can smoothly follow you — and the wider field of view means that you can see a full widescreen presentation without the extreme edges of the frame disappearing every time you move your head a bit. This is great for productivity, but for entertainment it’s magical — the technology disappears, and you are immersed in your favorite movie or TV.”
Xreal is delivering its final rounds of One Pro pre-orders to customers throughout June before beginning general availability sales starting on July 1. General availability pricing for One Pro is $649, €689 (euros), £579 GBP from Xreal.com, Amazon and BestBuy.com (with Amazon and BestBuy.com availability beginning later in July). Xreal is extending a limited time offer of pre-order pricing only from Xreal.com of $599 USD, €649 Euro, £549 GBP through the end of June.
To elevate the AR experience even further, Xreal has unveiled a new modular camera sensor called Xreal Eye, which brings native six degrees of freedom (6DoF) anchor capabilities to both the One and One Pro, along with taking first-person point-of-view photos and videos.
“With Xreal Eye, the One Series moves beyond head-tracked 3DoF to deliver a true-to-life 6DoF anchor experience,” said Ralph Jodice, general manager of North America at Xreal, in a statement. “You can now anchor a virtual screen anywhere in your environment and move around it just like a physical screen, walk past it, view it from behind, or get closer to expand the size. It’s not just immersive – it’s spatially real.”
With a simple USB-C connection, you can view videos and games in an HD, 1080p virtual screen available anytime you are.
Hands-on with the device
It was pretty painless to plug the Xreal One Pro into my laptop and do the firmware update for the glasses. It was over pretty quickly. Then I took a photo of the QR code and moved into the tutorial, which was also pretty quick.
Xreal says your phone, PC, or handheld gaming console thinks it’s connected to an external monitor when you connect it to Xreal glasses. This means your glasses are not processing and storing, sending or receiving your private content. Your content and information stays private, Xreal said.
I found the notion of anchoring a virtual screen anywhere to be pretty interesting in practice. I used the USB-C cord to connect the glasses to my laptop, and I was able to see the screen of my laptop instantly through the glasses. The screen could move as I turned my head from side to side. But I could also lock it so it stayed in place as I moved my head. I found this a pretty good way to watch shows like the Thunderbirds on Netflix. I happened to be on a plane, and I was able to watch Netflix on my laptop via the glasses. And the acrobatics of the Air Force jets looked pretty amazing on the glasses.
I also pulled the cord out and plugged it into my iPhone. It started working immediately, even without an application running on the iPhone. My iPhone wasn’t connected to the plane’s Wi-Fi, but I was able to watch the shows I had downloaded onto my iPhone ahead of time, including Turning Point: The Vietnam War, an excellent documentary on Netflix. The Bose sound was pretty immersive.
I passed it around to family members on the plane. One felt like they didn’t want to watch a video that way because it would cause dizziness. Xreal said it reduces motion sickness with a self-developed stabilization algorithm keeping your screen super smooth and super stable. It’s good for travelling andcommuting by plane, train and car.
I passed it to another. One tried it out and handed it back. Then I gave it to another family member, who plugged it into an iPhone and got a movie going. I never got it back. You can get a wide variety of content onto the device via your smartphone, your laptop or a device dubbed the Beam, which can both charge your device and play back your content as well. The good thing is that I could stay connected with the real world and know when the flight attendants were coming by with beverages.
There are some other applications like using the 120Hz glasses to play games, but I haven’t tried that yet.
Xreal Eye modular camera
The Xreal Eye modular camera is a 12MP camera for Xreal One and Xreal One Pro. It captures true first person POV photos and videos. It plugs into your glasses when you want it, and is easily removed when you don’t.
To capture photos and videos, attach the Xreal Eye by removing the rectangular cap resting at the bridge of the nose of the glasses, then press the small button on the top of the right temple to capture photos. Long hold the button to start recording video. Press it again to stop recording.
The screen adjusts to your movement
Xreal Eye’s 6DoF anchor functionality dramatically enhances everyday use. Whether pacing during calls, walking on a treadmill, or shifting positions while watching a movie, the screen naturally adjusts to your movement, just like in the physical world. The experience is more dynamic, responsive, and intuitive than ever before.
Xreal Eye will allow Xreal to expand the One Series experience by unlocking gesture control, live streaming via XREAL Beam Pro, and adding multimodal AI and mixed-reality view stitching in the future. XREAL Eye pre-orders begin on Xreal.com today for $99, with shipping expected to begin in July.
Since its debut, the Xreal One Series has seen good demand, with multiple sellouts and a record-setting wave of pre-orders for the One Pro, Xreal said.
In addition to customer enthusiasm, the One Series and its custom X1 spatial processing chip have earned critical acclaim — winning dozens of industries and editorial awards for innovation, display quality, comfort, and design. Media outlets and tech authorities have consistently ranked the One Series among the best AR devices available. The One Pro will only raise the industry’s bar higher.
This momentum isn’t just hype. In the IDC Worldwide quarterly AR/VR Tracker report in Q4 2024, IDC said that Xreal held the No. 1 global market share for the AR and optical see-through industry throughout 2024. IDC also said Xreal was the only augmented reality company to rank in the global top five by market share across the larger AR/VR industry throughout 2024.
And IDC said Xreal has remained in the top five AR/VR companies by shipments for eight consecutive quarters and is the only non-VR company to consistently reach that level. I’m thinking that the Xreal experience, which I have tracked over years, is starting to get fairly credible.
Formerly known as Nreal, Xreal was founded in 2017 and has since expanded with offices in China, Japan, South Korea with it’s U.S. headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.
These AR glasses are equipped with the company’s self-developed X1 chip, which enables a new array ofexperiences for users, of which you will have the chance to explore yourself. And they include new flat prism optics that enable the largest field of view for any AR device on the market.
Now we have to see what it can do with AI in upcoming models.
Disclosure: Xreal provided Xreal One Series glasses for the purposes of this story.
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