Augmented reality company Xreal has unveiled a new entry in its Air glasses line: the $699 Air 2 Ultra. The Air 2 Ultra glasses, which developers can pre-order today for delivery starting in March, are intended to compete with Meta’s Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro headsets. They are more complete than the $399 Air 2 model that Xreal – formerly Nreal – launched late last year, offering full position tracking (six degrees of freedom, or 6DOF) in Xreal’s typical sunglasses-style format. This makes them ripe not only for watching TV or playing flat-panel games on a projected screen, but also for running immersive AR apps, which is exactly what Xreal hopes developers will make them.
Xreal touts the Air 2 Ultra as a full-fledged “spatial computing” device, similar to its predecessor Lightweight mixed reality device, which also featured 6DOF tracking. Like the rest of the Air line, the Air 2 Ultra projects a floating image in front of users’ eyes. But it adds two 3D cameras, one on each side of the glasses, that can map the wearer’s surroundings and enable special features like hand tracking. This allows developers to create apps that blend physical and digital space rather than just displaying a conventional game, app, or video stream like the Air 2.
The Air 2 Ultra offers a 52-degree field of view compared to the Air 2’s 46 degrees; both products offer 500 nits of brightness, a 1080p display for each eye, and a refresh rate of up to 120 Hz. The Ultra glasses are a bit heavier, however, weighing 80 grams compared to 72 grams for the standard Air 2 . Like the Air 2, they can be plugged into a range of computing devices, including macOS and Windows computers, Samsung Android phones. , and the iPhone 15. On Android, macOS and Windows, they will support Xreal’s Nebula AR environment.
The Air 2 Ultra is aimed primarily at developers at the moment, but it will be sold through Xreal’s site to anyone interested, shipping to the US, UK, China, Japan, Korea, France, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands. (The Air 2 is currently available to consumers in the United States, Europe, and Asia.) It was revealed shortly after Xreal announced it had shipped 350,000 pairs of AR glasses to date and that it would expand the availability of the Air 2 to more countries in 2024.
The mixed reality options on the old Light glasses were pretty rudimentary, and it made sense to remove them to save weight and money. But the addition of 6DOF tracking allows Xreal to compete more directly with its best-known American competitors: Apple and Meta. Apple’s $3,499 Vision Pro is rumor has it that it will launch in February, and Apple has promised that developers will be able to create spatially immersive experiences alongside projected flat screens. Meta’s $499 Quest 3, which debuted last October, combines full-fledged virtual reality with mixed reality applications like digital tabletop games. Both headsets use passthrough mixed reality, which overlays digital objects onto a video feed, rather than the direct projection offered by Xreal – although Meta is working on that. projection-based AR glasses more similar to the Air 2 Ultra, and Apple is probably doing the same.
Correction: The Air 2 Ultra was initially described by Xreal as being aimed exclusively at developers; shortly after its release, Xreal told us that it would also be made available to consumers through its site. We have updated the story to reflect this.
