(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Imagine this. You sit down at your computer and put on a pair of augmented reality (AR) glasses. Through the lenses, you see multiple windows: Your familiar apps and tabs are spread out before you on a big virtual canvas, and you can rearrange them or switch among them easily. Say you're working in Slack. That window could appear in the center of your vision, surrounded by a bunch of others you can check out by turning your head or glancing to the side.
In effect, you've just moved your daily workflow off a small laptop screen onto a huge, customizable digital desktop that you can carry anywhere.
Sound intriguing? That's the promise of Spacetop, an AR productivity solution that's just launched on Windows 11. For $899, you get a pair of glasses and a 12-month software subscription from the startup Sightful. After the first year, you'll pay $200 annually to re-up your subscription. People who need vision assistance (like I do) can order prescription lens inserts for $50, or progressive lens inserts for $150.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The company used to offer it with proprietary PC hardware for early adopters as it developed the product. Now, though, you can use Sightful's solution with any AI PC, provided it has an Intel Core Ultra processor (exclusively, for now). The neural processing unit inside those chips helps run the software.
How does Spacetop work and feel in practice? Here's my firsthand experience.
Design and Setup: XReal Glasses and Prescription Lenses
To try this all out, Sightful provided me with an HP OmniBook laptop with Spacetop installed, along with a pair of XReal Air Ultra 2 AR glasses. It’s important to note that this is a review of the Spacetop software, and not the glasses per se: XReal is a separate company from Sightful, and it has produced AR products for years. But I can't ignore some critical facts: You need glasses to make the product work, the XReals are the only ones that are compatible right now, and you can't get a subscription without getting the glasses, too. If the AR hardware is required and is basically only available in one form, I have to opine on it sometime.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Since I need vision correction, the Sightful team also gave me an optical lens attachment (I provided my prescription in advance), which easily pops onto the bridge of the glasses. This is a pretty neat solution for what could be a complicated problem.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)From there, I simply connected the glasses to the laptop with a USB Type-C cable (the port is on the end of one arm, so you can tuck the cable behind your ear) and launched the Spacetop software.
The glasses feel well-made and come with a couple of nose-bridge attachments, plus the optical attachment. The outer lenses are tinted. At a glance, they could pass for real shades, though they're not as dark and are a bit thick, and the nose-bridge piece holds them farther from your face than real glasses.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Attached to the backside of the tinted lenses, just beyond the prescription inserts, are a pair of smaller curved lenses that allow you to see the virtual screen before your eyes. That’s three types of lenses beyond the nose rests, if you need a corrective insert like I do. The whole rig reminded me of an advanced microscope.
While I prefer the glasses to a full headset, I wouldn’t call them comfortable. The design fits well, and the nose pads are soft, but even at a relatively light 2.9 ounces, they weigh many times more than my normal glasses—a lot of weight to rest on the bridge of your nose for a sustained amount of time.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)I recognize that this comfort level will vary by person, and I may have a lower tolerance than some. But I could only get through a half-hour to an hour with the glasses, and that’s coming from someone who has worn glasses since he was about eight years old.
We’ll get to the usefulness of the virtual experience, but on a sheer comfort level, these types of practical obstacles make me less than keen to seek out AR and VR experiences. Again, the XReal glasses are not part of Spacetop, but you need to wear an AR device on your face to use the software. Bottom line: I don’t find wearing them more enjoyable than working on a laptop in the usual way.
How Does the Spacetop Experience Work?
The concept behind Spacetop’s virtual environment is not to translate a single virtual version of your PC’s desktop onto the glasses, or to split your workflow into two monitor-like digital screens. Instead, Spacetop creates a large black digital canvas (equivalent to 100 inches) onto which you can add and move traditional windows. The desktop of your computer can be just one of several windows you see at once, as if you have one enormous display before your eyes.
With the glasses on, Spacetop shows a virtual version of the laptop screen roughly in the center, but it’s only one of many potential windows. I can open up, for example, multiple browser tabs as their own windows, dragging them out to the side (using the laptop’s touchpad or a mouse) on the black backdrop, stacking and placing them like a gallery wall of picture frames.
I can’t show you precisely what this looks like in a screenshot or video, and the mock-up photos look more seamless than the reality does. During use, the windows are spread out in front of me like a big digital curved monitor, rather than truly floating in space around me like some of the renderings show—it’s a more limited field of view, even if it's still something much more expansive than a laptop screen.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Getting acclimated to the environment takes a few moments, and you'll have some controls to learn. Some of these are physical buttons on the glasses that can extensively alter the experience. A button on the underside of the right arm changes the dimming level of your virtual workspace; you can black out the edges of your vision to create a more immersive display, or use a mode that lets you see some of the real world around you. That's the one to use in public. Be warned, though, that you'll mostly just be able to make out stuff in your peripheral vision. You can also look out under the bottom of the glasses to find the touchpad or one of the many keyboard shortcuts that let you manipulate the virtual workspace.
Left and Right Shift together, for example, will re-center your view to the middle of the canvas in case you get disoriented, while you can pan up and down with another key combination. Tilt controls let you angle the entire experience if you’re sitting in a reclined position and need to shift the Spacetop UI higher, for example. You may struggle to recall those commands and others at first, but I got familiar with the go-to combinations after a while.
My Spacetop Experience
With Spacetop up and running, I try to forget the moving parts and get into the experience. After a while, it becomes natural to turn my head or move my eyes to look at browser tabs, and see Spotify, Slack, and other applications spread out in front of me. Rather than minimizing and searching for the right tab, I can pull all the essentials and see them simultaneously, something I can't do on a small laptop display.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)My main window for typing can stay centered, with my reference materials or a video placed off to the side; I can check them at a glance, which is neat. Still, I'm not sure I want to turn my neck and head for hours, and I often want to briefly take the glasses off to glance at the laptop, talk to someone, or check my phone.
A home bar along the bottom of your vision helps center your experience, displays all of the open applications, and provides quick access to settings. This process can sometimes be more awkward in AR, so having it surfaced nearby is helpful. In addition to those mentioned, you'll find a handful of other shortcuts and tricks to make your experience easier (once you're past the learning curve).
You'll find more nuance here (and additional shortcuts), but I'll spare you the blow-by-blow of navigating the virtual space. For all the details, it's intuitive enough to manipulate the canvas, find and move windows, orient yourself, dim the environment, and make other changes. Sightful did decent work making what could be deeply complicated feel natural (given that you're wearing AR glasses and hooked up to a PC, of course).
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Beyond the discomfort and some inconveniences, my main complaint is that I don’t feel like I have a whole field of vision when using Spacetop, which may again come down to the design of the glasses. I can constantly see the bottom of the built-in curved lens in my vision, which is distracting and physically disorienting, and undercuts the product's seamlessness. I continually tried to ignore this, and went about viewing Spacetop through a slimmer view box than I felt like I should. (I tried to correct this when the Spacetop team first set me up in person, but this seems to be as good as it gets; the bottom edge of the glasses never really left my vision.)
All in all, the Spacetop software is sharp and reliable. It’s stable, usable, and (mostly) looks clear. You'll encounter some finicky elements, but the experience is largely customizable, and some of it is down to the learning curve. If you’re open to working in AR, the screen real estate alone is a huge improvement over a portable laptop, and the glasses and cable easily pack away into a bag.
Ultimately, though, I simply don’t prefer this setup to traditional computing. I don't doubt some enthusiast users will love it, but that’s not me. (Or, I suspect, a lot of mainstream users.) The positives just can't outweigh the negatives: wearing heavy specialized glasses for an extended time; leaning on the laptop inputs to navigate the digital space; staying wired to the PC; and other inconveniences. Personally, I would be hard pressed to fire up Spacetop in public, and I don’t think it fills a need.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Then there's the price tag. The package has a high cost of entry (including the price of an Intel-only AI PC) and a steep annual subscription. You'll pay a lot for something that is, at times, less convenient than what you've already got.
Simply put, this product didn't make me want to work in AR space for hours on end. If you know you do, or are at least willing to brave the costs to find out, this is a capable solution.