XReal One Pro Review: The Best Big-Screen AR Smart Glasses

As a set of wired AR video smart glasses, the XReal One Pro can work with any device that outputs a DisplayPort signal over USB-C. That includes nearly all PCs and most phones and tablets with a USB-C port, including recent iPhone and iPad models. It won’t work with a Nintendo Switch or Switch 2 due to its non-standard USB-C output, though you can connect it through its own dock and an HDMI-to-USB-C adapter. An adapter will also let you connect any other game console, media streamer, and the like to the glasses. XReal doesn’t currently offer an adapter, but you can find a third-party one for $20 to $50. Make sure it’s an adapter that specifically treats HDMI as the source and the USB-C port as the output; most are designed to work in the other direction, and won’t work with the One Pro.

The One Pro shares the same built-in AR tricks as the One, letting you tweak how it looks without going through a dedicated configuration app or hub like the XReal Beam Pro. It features head tracking that you can toggle between two modes: anchor (to keep the display fixed in one location using 3DOF motion tracking) and follow (so the display moves to stay in front of your eyes wherever you turn). Double-pressing the menu button opens up a settings menu, from which you can make other changes like adjusting the virtual size and distance of the screen and configuring what short and long presses of the shortcut button do. You can also enable additional viewing modes for the glasses, including a virtual ultra-wide monitor perspective and a side view mode that shrinks the picture down and puts it in an unobtrusive corner of your vision so you can focus on your surroundings. The side view is an especially neat trick I haven’t seen on any other smart glasses.

Built-in 3DOF motion tracking is already a compelling option that can add immersiveness to your viewing experience, since it makes the display act like a floating theater screen you can look away from rather than a monitor strapped to your face. Its presence on the One made that device seem much more sophisticated as an AR display than similar smart glasses I’ve tested, and that’s the case for the One Pro, too. It can be further enhanced with the optional $99 XReal Eye accessory for both the One and One Pro. It’s a small camera that plugs into the port on the bridge of the glasses and enables six-degrees-of-freedom (6DOF) tracking by visually scanning your environment. 

3DOF anchors the glasses’ virtual screen in place relative to you only by direction. Distance isn’t a factor, so if you get up and physically move around, you won’t get closer to the image or further away from it. 6DOF anchors the screen based on its physical position, so you can actually move around it as if it were an object in the room. This technology is best seen on the Apple Vision Pro ($3,499) and other XR headsets. 

XReal One Pro with XReal Eye (Credit: Will Greenwald)

With the XReal Eye, the XReal One and One Pro can do the same thing, in a very loose sense. Anchoring the virtual screen in front of my TV, I could indeed move closer to the screen and step around it. The picture would constantly move with me to some extent, though, making it shift back and forth a few feet when I walked around my living room. It felt like a half-step between 3DOF and 6DOF, where the head tracking is more accurate than without the Eye, but the position of the screen is taken as a suggestion more than a fixed point. This isn’t surprising, though, considering its calculations are based on the input of a single camera. The Apple Vision Pro has multiple cameras constantly scanning all around you and feeding that data into a standalone system built from the ground up to process spatial positioning using hardware that’s several times more expensive and much bulkier. To its credit, the 6DOF tracking seemed to work much better outside, with more space and light for the camera to work with, and the screen stayed in place next to a tree much more consistently than it did in my living room. It’s safe to say that lighting is a big factor here.

The XReal Eye also lets you take photos and record video with the One and the One Pro. When you insert the Eye, the shortcut button on the glasses will be automatically set to shoot snapshots with a short press and start capturing video with a long press. The glasses have 2GB of built-in storage, and you can offload footage to the computer or phone it’s connected to through the glasses’ menu, which also lets you choose the length of video clips (15, 30, or 60 seconds). Don’t expect stunning visual results, though. Photos are 2,016-by-1,512 and videos are 1,600-by-1,200, and even at those resolutions and in good lighting, they look pretty fuzzy. The $299 Ray-Ban Meta cameras are far sharper, though they don’t have any video display at all.

Shot with the XReal Eye (Credit: Will Greenwald)

These optional Eye-enabled features feel more like novelties than anything else, but like the built-in 3DOF tracking introduced on the XReal One, they elevate the smart glasses category with their presence. Spending an extra $100 on the Eye probably isn’t necessary, but if your living room or workspace is big and well-lit, the 6DOF tracking can offer a taste of a more advanced augmented reality.