Xreal's Project Aura Aims for More Than Just Entertainment

Xreal has always occupied a somewhat different niche in the smartglasses market. Rather than normal-looking glasses with some smart features, the company offers a more immersive AR experience that's particularly well-suited for entertainment. That approach is very much the same with the company's Android XR-powered Project Aura. But after spending some time with the glasses at Google I/O, it's clear that Xreal is trying to do much, much more than make another pair of cinema glasses.

If you think of the upcoming audio-only glasses from Warby Parker and Gentle Monsters as the minimalist forms of Android XR on glasses, Xreal's Project Aura is definitely the maximalist version. Instead of smart glasses you're meant to wear throughout the day, Project Aura is kind of a supercharged version of the company's One Pro glasses.

The glasses themselves look and feel very similar to the One Pro frames. But Project Aura adds three cameras to the setup: one on each side of the frames for hand tracking and a third in the center for snapping photos and video. Xreal isn't sharing much in the way of specs just yet, but the 70-degree field of view display was impressive. It was extremely sharp and bright, even in the sunny outdoor conditions where I was testing. And it was wide enough that I didn't feel like anything was getting cut off while watching a YouTube video or scrolling in Chrome, though I did have to remind myself to glance left and right to see additional content like the YouTube comments section.

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The interface was also super easy to navigate with my hands. The main gesture is a pinching motion that will feel pretty familiar to anyone who has used other AR setups. I found that the glasses were able to detect my hands pretty reliably and I had no issues resizing or moving windows around.

Unlike the One Pro glasses, Project Aura relies on a tethered connection to a separate puck, much like Apple's Vision Pro. Xreal's phone-sized puck also has a built-in trackpad and fingerprint sensor, though I wasn't able to use either of those features. It did get a bit hot during my (roughly 20-minute) demo, but we were also outside in almost 90-degree heat.

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Xreal was showcasing a few of its own homegrown apps to highlight some of Project Aura's capabilities, including a simple AR drawing app and something called "Gemini Molecule." The latter offered a good demonstration of Aura's multimodal capabilities: look at an object in front of you, give it a pinch with your fingers and the app would spit out the name of the material and a visualization of its molecular structure. The company told me both of these apps were quickly vibe-coded using Gemini. And while they weren't the most compelling AR apps I've ever used, they did offer an interesting look at what might be possible once third-party developers are able to get their hands on Aura.

Though Project Aura definitely has the same possibilities for immersive entertainment as Xreal's other glasses, the company seems to be positioning Project Aura as more of a pro-level device. You can connect the glasses to a laptop and use Aura as an external display. Throw in a Bluetooth keyboard and you could presumably accomplish a good amount of actual work, though I wasn't able to try out this kind of setup. One of the Xreal engineers I spoke with, though, insisted he had ditched his normal monitor entirely in favor of Aura glasses.

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