The Xreal One AR glasses is a traveller’s best friend

I spent a lot of time travelling last year, either on business trips to Europe or the U.S. or taking the Go train to visit my friends and family at the east end of the GTA. It’s a lot of time doing nothing except using my phone, tablet, or laptop. I tend to read when travelling, commuting, or watching content. Typically, I download many movies, TV series, and YouTube videos on these trips, and while craning my neck to watch my little screen, it is okay. The Xreal One is a better option.

The Xreal One is a pair of glasses that provide an augmented reality experience. It uses the company’s X1 chip to provide spatial processing, enabling you to watch content with a hovering screen in front of your eyes. I love this sort of thing; bringing the screen close to your eyes is an immersive experience. It also has a 50-degree field of view, allowing you to have a 146-inch screen, and you can adjust the distance to feel like the screen is several feet away from your eyes.

Images are bright, and there aren’t a lot of artifacts when watching content, so it looks like an actual screen. You can also have the screen follow your head or lock it to a particular spot. I mentioned travelling a lot, but I use it before falling asleep at night when I typically watch a new anime. I love using the Xreal One for animated series, as it gives a closer look at beautifully animated series like Jujustu Kaisen or Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End. This experience isn’t unique to the Xreal One, though. I can use the Meta Quest 3s to do the same thing and watch immersive content. However, the Xreal One’s true benefit is its size and style — they’re just like ordinary sunglasses.

I wear glasses regularly, and the ones I wear are the RayBan Meta. These glasses weigh 48g, which is a bit heavy for glasses. The Xreal One weighs 84g, which is pretty heavy for regular glasses, but it is much lighter than the Meta Quest 3s, which weighs 514g or the Apple Vision Pro, which weighs about 600g without the battery attachment. However, those two are virtual reality headsets and not glasses, so to compare apples to apples, the RayNeo X3 augmented glasses weigh pretty much the same at 85g. I can see people having issues with the weight of the Xreal One, especially if you’re wearing glasses on the lighter end, but even though they are almost twice as heavy as my RayBan Metas, I don’t have any issues with them. Speaking about the RayNeo X3s, it’s not too bad, but I like that the Xreal One offers straightforward controls. You don’t need to download an app; three buttons let you navigate the menus. The menus offer a lot of control, like distancing the display from the right front of your eyes up to 10m, controlling the width of videos, and making it widescreen, which is excellent when you have the Xreal One connected to your laptop.

They also look great. Some people might think you’re blind, but they’re stylish and much less awkward to wear on a plane than the dragonfly-looking Apple Vision Pro. I also like how easy the Xreal One is to use; plug it into your smartphone, and you’re golden. It has no battery, so you never have to worry about charging. It also has its own volume, but you can use your headphones, especially when travelling. I like that all you need is the USB-C to C cord and your smartphone, which means it’s also pretty easy to bring in your carry-on luggage or backpack.

I’ve been saying many good things about the Xreal One and enjoy using the smart glasses. Xreal assured me that the glasses are available in Canada, but I can’t seem to find the link myself, so I’ve reached out to them again. The Xreal One costs US$499 (CAD$717), which is pretty expensive to watch streaming content while commuting or travelling. I don’t know if I’d spend this much money, but perhaps wait for a Black Friday sale.