AR Glasses suck still in AR, but they are solid secondary screens

Two years ago, at CES 2023, I looked into my augmented reality crystal ball and expected that he does not want to talk about “glass holes” again. CES 2025 it was flooded with AR goggles, and you couldn’t walk five feet without finding another booth asking you to put a pair on your eyes. The display of glasses looks better than ever. The controls feel tighter. However, they are not there yet, not by miles. The best glasses we used were just screen replacements.

Companies like Chamelo are trotting out smart glasses with color-changing lenses. Beyond those, there were hordes of glasses that functioned as portable cameras, essentially equivalent to the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses which have become increasingly popular in these last two years. These weren’t all small businesses, either. Beside new handheldsLenovo has debuted a revised pair of glasses, the $400 Legion Glasses 2. They are an upgrade to the company’s similar, glasses attached from 2023 with much better screen clarity and brightness. You have to sit on your face right, but they offer great-looking micro-OLED screens and loud, clear audio.

Those glasses were made for laptops, although they are still accessories to the mobile gaming experience. Similarly, AR glasses maker XReal debuted its $500 XReal One and $600 XReal One Pro. These glasses are attached to your phone or computer to create a secondary screen. They include a switch to cement the image in place or that follows your head wherever you look. Even better, they offer an ultrawide screen view when attached to a PC, so you can get that Apple Vision Pro ultrawide Mac mirroring experience at a fraction of the price. They were our favorite glasses of the convention, and they earned a spot on ours the best show list

CES 2025’s Functional AR glasses were filled with fiery green text

As our readers have pointed out, XReal’s latest doesn’t fit the mold of “augmented reality” or even “extended reality.” It’s a hard thing to hear, but all those glasses with any real curved XR were just prototypes. In the two years since I wrote my original AR CES article, these glasses are still trying to solve the same problems.

Take TCL’s RayNeo brand. The company flashed its RayNeo X3 Pro around my eyes and tried to translate the text from Mandarin to English. It worked, at least most of the time. With too much clamor around us, the birds struggled to interpret the language accurately or hear our commands. Even then, the translation was slow and cumbersome, and it certainly didn’t look or feel like a fully finished product. The glasses have touch controls on the right arm which worked – mostly. As with other glasses, it is necessary to sit on the nose precisely to see the wall of green, the beta text that writes its connected software AI. These were all similar problems I had with the company’s prototype glasses two years ago.

At least the RayNeo glasses used Waveguide screens instead of projection, like on the XReal glasses. The company also said its glasses include two sensors for image recognition and hand tracking, but I didn’t get to demo any of those capabilities. Glasses brand Rokid also had a pair of glasses that displayed lists of apps that you could view on the glasses with some manual controls, but you’d still only see green text displayed in your AR environment.

It was a routine problem I had with other brands’ products. Slapped the LAWK One glasses with their wraparound shades around my noggin, and I immediately felt like the kind of asshole who owns several jet skis and wants everyone to know what they do. The glasses are made for sports users who want to start racing timers in AR. Could you start a timer? Yes, but then you have ugly green text obstructing your field of view. LAWK also claims that its new View glasses will be able to stream live on TikTok, but I wasn’t able to test any of that functionality. Those are more of a Ray-Ban Meta style lens without a screen.

So far, no one has cracked all the problems with the AR Glasses

Based on what I’ve experienced, any true “augmented reality” glasses don’t feel like a complete product, even though I brought similar designs to CES two years ago. Like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, I had difficulty trusting AI models with all the simplest questions, and without processing in the device, they still rely on external devices for everything you really want to use.

Meta is one of the few companies that shows us the possibilities of real AR glasses, although we still don’t know when or if they will become a product that you can buy. U The company’s Orion project he uses a pair of AR glasses, a wristband for motion controls, and a transformation puck that sits in your pocket. Rumors indicate that Samsung might release its own pair of smart glasses this year with more features of AI vision, although based on those suggestions, it certainly cannot be a substitute for the phone, at least not yet.

I am bullish on AR glasses. They have an appeal far beyond bulky and heavy VR headsets. XReal’s flagship AR glasses from last year were the $700 Air 2 Ultrawhich also featured some hand tracking and AR capabilities. They were limited when I tested them last year with a prototype UI. Developing an untethered UI is difficult. U Laptop Spacetop G1 from 2024 it uses these same XReal glasses instead of a traditional screen, but it runs on an Android-based OS without the full functionality of a Windows or Mac PC. They’re a developer’s paradise, but not exactly the kind of device Joe Schmo reaches for first.

We are still in the prototyping phase for AR, but companies think there is a market for these devices now. No one but developers and self-proclaimed futurists will find most of these AR glasses useful in everyday life. But if you’re on a cheap red-eye flight without a TV built into the seatback, these lightweight, attached secondary screen glasses might be a good way to watch a movie without the bulk of a laptop or, worse, a massive Apple. Vision Pro Headphones.