Augmented reality company Xreal has revealed a new entry in its line of Air glasses: the $699 Air 2 Ultra. The Air 2 Ultra glasses, which developers can pre-order today for shipping starting in March, are ultimately intended to compete with Apple's Meta's Quest 3 and Vision Pro headsets. They have more features than the $399 Air 2 model that Xreal (formerly Nreal) launched late last year and offer full positional tracking (six degrees of freedom, or 6DOF) in Xreal's typical sunglasses-style form factor. That makes them ripe not only for watching TV or playing flat-screen games on a projected screen, but also for running immersive AR applications, which is exactly what Xreal hopes developers will do with them.
Xreal presents the Air 2 Ultra as a full “spatial computing” device similar to its previous Light 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 dual 3D cameras, one on each side of the glasses, that can map the user's environment and enable special features like hand tracking. That allows developers to create apps that combine physical and digital space rather than simply 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 feature 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 the Air 2's 72 grams. standard. Like the Air 2, they can connect to a variety of computing devices, including macOS and Windows-based computers, Samsung Android phones. and the iPhone 15. On Android, macOS and Windows, they will be compatible with Xreal's Nebula AR environment.
The Air 2 Ultra is primarily aimed at developers for now, but will be sold through the Xreal site to anyone interested and will ship to the US, UK, China, Japan, Korea, France, Germany, Italy, Czech Republic and the Netherlands. (The Air 2 is currently available to consumers in the US, Europe and Asia.) It came shortly after Xreal announced that it had shipped 350,000 pairs of AR glasses to date and would expand availability of the Air 2 to more countries in 2024.
The mixed reality options on the older Light glasses were pretty rudimentary, and it made sense to remove them to save some weight and money. But adding back 6DOF tracking allows Xreal to compete more directly with its best-known American competitors: Apple and Meta. Apple's $3,499 Vision Pro is rumored to launch in February, and Apple has promised that developers will be able to create spatially immersive experiences alongside projected flat displays. Meta's $499 Quest 3, which debuted last October, combines full virtual reality with mixed reality applications like digital board games. Both headsets use pass-through mixed reality, which overlays digital objects onto a video stream, rather than the direct projection that Xreal offers, although Meta is working on projection-based AR glasses more similar to the Air 2 Ultra, and will likely Apple is doing the same. .
Correction: Xreal originally described the Air 2 Ultra as a developer exclusive; Shortly after its release, Xreal told us it would also be available to consumers through its site. We have updated the story to reflect this.
