“URGENT: Immediate Action Required” blasts into my eyeballs as I scroll through the impossibly giant email inbox looming directly in front of my face.
I’m reclined way back in a chair, wearing a pair of Xreal smart glasses. Tethered to my laptop via a USB-C cord, these glasses mirror the laptop screen and project it into a virtual display. The virtual screen is gigantic, equivalent to a 170-inch TV that feels about a foot away from my nose. I’m the only one who can see it, and so I’ve got this massive display all to myself.
With this technological marvel, I conjure the most riveting view imaginable: five workplace training modules about business principles and cybersecurity that my boss has repeatedly reminded me are very overdue. The text on the screen is blurry, but I complete them all within my virtual display. It takes several hours. By the time I’m done, the glasses have overheated, my forehead is sweaty, and I’m still not sure I can actually recognize a phishing email.
Virtual display glasses are a much more niche category of mixed-reality smart glasses than the camera-equipped, AI-powered frames that have dominated the product market—namely, Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses. Made by companies like Xreal, Viture, and Rokid, these glasses aim to bring a screen directly to your face. Like a portable monitor, plug the USB-C cable into the arm of the glasses, then stick the other end into the port of just about any laptop, phone, tablet, or handheld gaming console. Slap ’em on, and that screen mirrors in a holographic VR-style projection, right in your center of vision.
Wearing them, you can chill out in an airplane seat, lie prone, even dangle upside-down if you like, and the big screen stays right there with you. (No tech neck!) Yup, you’re basically cosplaying the lazy humans in Wall-E. Hooray.
The ROG Xreal R1.
Photograph: Courtesy of XREAL
Virtual display glasses don’t get the heat of privacy issues that Meta’s “pervert glasses” do. No cameras, no recording—just sweet, sweet content consumption beamed out an inch from your eye holes. If you’re feeling generous, the Xreal glasses could even be lauded for their privacy protections, at least for the user. Got sensitive documents or embarrassing videos you’re trying to watch on a plane? A virtual display is one only the wearer can see. (The Xreal glasses also have speakers in the frames that do leak sound, so be careful with your audible content consumption.)
Display-only glasses make good on at least one promise made by other wearable mixed-reality devices. When Apple launched its flawed Vision Pro headset, one of its primary features was spatial computing that let you work and watch entertainment in a virtual workspace. But the device was too heavy and bulky to wear for long. Xreal’s specs are much simpler and less elegant but do accomplish most of that goal in a much lighter package. (We’ve also had a pretty great experience with Sightful’s Spacetop spatial computing interface, also powered by Xreal glasses.)
“The fundamental thing these glasses do well is that they just work,” says Anshel Sag, a principal analyst at the industry advisory firm Moor Insights and Strategies. Sag says he wears these kinds of glasses regularly on flights. “You plug them in, and you have faith that you’re going to get a video signal on those glasses that mostly matches what’s on the screen of the device they’re plugged into.”
I’ve been swapping between two of the glasses. First, Xreal’s $849 ROG Xreal R1, available to preorder and expected to ship in September. It displays that 171-inch virtual screen in a 57-degree field of view, which you can anchor in place or have the screen stay dead center in your vision as you turn your head different directions.
The Xreal xbx A01+.
Photograph: Courtesy of XREAL
I’ve also used the much cheaper, much lighter Xreal xbx A01+, which the company launched in May and started shipping in July. It costs $299 but has a smaller screen with a 50-degree field of view. It has less of a heat issue but also lower screen quality. Crucially, you can’t anchor the screen, which can make watching stuff disorienting when the screen moves every time your head does.
Xreal’s primary selling point for these glasses is gaming or watching videos. The glasses don’t use batteries and instead sip power from your plugged-in device. I’ve connected both frames to my Steam Deck and blasted through seas of demons in Diablo IV on a giant virtual screen. I tried watching the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings films, but I had plugged the device into my phone, which died halfway through the first movie. I’ve also plugged the glasses into my laptop for regular browsing, lurking on social media, and being a nuisance in my workplace Slack.
The glasses don’t work with everything. I tried connecting them to my PlayStation 5, which required a much longer cord and more patience than I can muster in return for a not-so-great display across my vision.
The very stern faces of actors portraying harassment victims in my workplace training videos have an almost 3D-ified quality, their pouting chins jutting out past the blocks of text. The animations in this very good WIRED story hit way harder than they did on my lil’ laptop screen. Unfortunately, the smaller text in the article was almost too blurry to read.
Virtual displays still don’t have the resolution and fidelity that we’re used to on our laptops and smartphones. They tend to be fuzzy, and I almost feel like it’s a simulation of what it would be like to need a glasses prescription. After staring at that virtual screen for hours, I pop it off, and it feels like I’ve had my eyes crossed for too long and they’re ready to stay that way.
The Xreal xbx A01+.
Photograph: Courtesy of XREAL
The glasses also aren’t exactly inconspicuous enough for me to feel comfortable walking around in them. You can pop off the projection lenses and wear them like regular glasses, but you probably won’t, because they look very chunky and won’t fool anyone. As I used them in the office, I asked a nearby coworker if I looked cool wearing them. She just laughed.
So the Xreal glasses aren’t perfect. They certainly aren’t something I want to wear all that long. But they are good enough at what they do to offer a glimpse of a smart glasses ecosystem coming into focus. They also seem to be growing in popularity. Tech analyst firm International Data Corporation wrote in a report that virtual monitor glasses, like Xreal and Viture, “represent the fastest-growing segment” of the smart glasses market. IDC projects them selling around 3 million units in 2026. That’s a small part of the same projection that puts sales of all smart glasses at nearly 14 million units in 2026, but it ain’t nothing.
Xreal also has bigger ambitions that will take its products into another category of XR glasses—the ones with cameras and recording capabilities, though they’re still not designed to be something you wear walking about. Xreal’s Project Aura, a partnership with Google running on the Android XR platform, will launch later this year. All of Xreal’s efforts have been leading to this.
“These are a means to an end, and that end is Project Aura,” Sag says. He doesn’t think the existence of the Aura glasses—expected to cost under $1,500—spells the end of Xreal’s other offerings. “You have to be able to create access points for people at different prices,” Sag says. “And that’s why I think these glasses will continue to exist, because you have to ramp people up to making a purchase over a thousand dollars.”
