The Viture Pro earned an Editors' Choice award last year for its bright picture, dimmable lenses, and (my favorite feature) focus adjustment dials. The $499 Luma Pro is the midrange model in Viture's new line, and it keeps the general design and features of the Viture Pro while drastically expanding the picture it shows with a much wider field of view. It also adds subtle accent lighting and a built-in camera for good measure (though the latter won't be functional until a future update). The Luma Pro is a solid upgrade over last year’s model, and a worthy choice for its bright screen and focus dials that negate the need for prescription lens inserts. If you can increase your budget, the XReal One Pro ($650), our Editors' Choice for AR smart glasses, offers built-in 3DOF (three degrees of freedom) motion tracking and a few unique display modes.

Design: Like Sunglasses With Light Strips

The Luma Pro keeps the unassuming profile of the Viture Pro, but adds a few design elements that make it less stealthy. To start, the bridge now has a visible pinhole camera facing forward. The camera is only for spatial capture and 6DOF motion tracking through Viture’s SpaceWalker mobile app (available for Android and iOS) and isn’t designed to take photos, but its presence might still be off-putting to eagle-eyed and privacy-minded people. The glasses come with privacy stickers you can put over the camera, at least. The stickers obscure only the small, glossy plastic patch on the bridge where the camera is, and otherwise disappear against the frames.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Speaking of which, the plastic frames are dark, but translucent around the lenses and on the inner surfaces of the temples. The material is dark enough to appear black or gray at a glance, but clear enough to reveal the circuitry and light strips in the temples. The outer surfaces of the temples are opaque up to the ear hooks, with a gray-and-black pattern and an orange Viture logo on each. The earhooks have translucent gray silicone sections to rest over the ears, then transition back into translucent plastic at the tips. The right tip has a magnetic pogo connector for the included proprietary USB-C cable, and a small rubber cap is included that you can slip over the connector to prevent your hair from getting caught between the magnets.

Yes, I mentioned light strips. The Luma Pro goes full gamer mode with dynamic lighting effects. Orange LED accents on the left earhook glow, a flourish I haven’t seen in any other smart glasses. The same area on the right earhook is taken up by the cable connector and doesn't glow.

The effect is subtle because the lights don't stay on while you wear the glasses. The earhook simply lights up when you connect a device and then turns off again. The lights then flash or fade when you press some of the glasses' buttons, but that's about it. It's a fun little feature, but it's really nothing more than an affectation that doesn't change the experience of using the glasses in any way.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

A button on the right temple toggles the lens transparency with one tap and the light strip effect with a double-tap.

Besides the button on the right temple, the Luma Pro has a second button and a rocker on the left temple. Pressing the left button switches the rocker between adjusting volume and screen brightness. Double-pressing the left button lets you choose between five different picture modes (Cold, Film, True Color, Vivid, and Warm). A tiny menu pops up near the top of the display for selecting the picture mode, and you’ll see visual notifications when changing volume and brightness and toggling the dimmable lenses and light strip, but that’s it for the in-glasses interface. There isn’t a whole menu system for more direct control over how the glasses behave, like you get on the XReal One Pro.

Specs: A Brighter and Wider Picture Than the Viture Pro

One of the reasons Viture’s smart glasses have become favorites for me is their diopter adjustments. Focus wheels on the top of the frames let you correct for nearsightedness to a strength of up to SPH -4.0. This is weaker than the Viture Pro’s range of up to -5.0, and the Rokid Max 2 can reach an even stronger -6.0, so keep that in mind if you have very strong myopia. If your nearsightedness is mild to moderate, you can use the smart glasses without getting prescription lens inserts like XReal and RayNeo’s glasses require.

More than the accent lights and the camera, the Luma Pro’s significant upgrade over the Viture Pro is its display. According to the company, it has the same high 1,000-nit peak brightness, but with a 52-degree field of view to the Viture Pro’s 46 degrees. That’s equivalent to a 152-inch screen viewed from 10 feet away. The resolution’s also a bit higher at 1,920 by 1,200 than its predecessor's more standard 1,920 by 1,080. The XReal One Pro has an even wider 57-degree field of view, but it’s $150 more expensive and, at 700 nits, isn’t as bright.

For comparison, the base Viture Luma model, which costs $399, has a 50-degree field of view and most of the same features as the Pro, and the upcoming Viture Beast ($549) boasts a record-breaking 58-degree field of view with some built-in features the other Luma models lack.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The Luma Pro’s picture looks great. It’s huge and noticeably brighter than the XReal One Pro, which isn’t dim by any means. The higher peak brightness on the Luma Pro means you can use it more easily in well-lit settings with the outward-facing lenses transparent. With the XReal One Pro and One (and the Viture One, the Viture Pro’s predecessor), darkening the lenses to improve visibility can be required if there’s a lot of ambient light.

Colors are vibrant, and while I can’t perform the same tests on smart glasses that I do on TVs, they appear reasonably accurate and well-balanced. The ability to switch between picture modes to adjust the color is a nice touch, and is not found on most smart glasses. 

The picture is also quite sharp, though that’s no great feat for AR video glasses now. The Luma Pro's slightly higher vertical resolution isn't a huge boon, because the top and bottom edges of the picture became blurry or disappeared at 1,920 by 1,200 when connected to my laptop. Dropping the resolution to the standard 1080p fixed this issue, making my tabs and taskbar much easier to read. This will be less of an issue when watching a movie or playing a game, since most movies and shows are displayed at a 16:9 aspect ratio that matches 1080p anyway, but game UI elements in the corners of the screen can still get clipped at the taller resolution. This isn’t a drawback for the Luma Pro when compared against 1080p smart glasses, but it means the higher resolution isn’t particularly helpful, either.

Features: Head Tracking Requires an App

While the Luma Pro doesn’t have many built-in head-tracking features or other gimmicks, you can enable 3DOF using Viture’s free SpaceWalker software for Android, iOS, MacOS, and Windows. This software was also available on previous Viture smart glasses, but it still feels very limited.

The mobile versions of SpaceWalker set up a simple AR interface with a web browser and a handful of media apps, all of which you can use with head tracking, but it won’t work with any other apps outside the interface. The Windows SpaceWalker software is more robust, letting you configure up to three virtual screens you can treat like monitors. It puts a fair processing load on your PC, though, and Viture recommends having, at minimum, an Intel Core i7-13620H CPU and Nvidia GeForce 1060 GPU to run it. It also advises against playing games through SpaceWalker.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The XReal One and One Pro handle head tracking much better than Viture’s smart glasses and SpaceWalker. With the former, tracking is all done by the glasses themselves, using the connected device as a simple video source. It’s easier to set up and use, and lets you do much more without eating your computer or phone's resources. Their ultrawide monitor mode is helpful when working on my laptop by giving me a huge 3,840-by-1,080 virtual screen I can look over. SpaceWalker enables the same type of view and some multi-monitor views on the Luma Pro, but you have to jump through some hoops to use them.

I mentioned earlier that the camera will enable 6DOF motion tracking, but that isn’t the case currently. It’s a feature planned for the future, and the camera on the Luma Pro isn't functional at all yet.

All of this might sound like I’m down on the Luma Pro, but even with awkward head tracking and blurry edges at full resolution, it still works exceptionally well for its fundamental function and is a comprehensive upgrade to the Viture Pro. Its picture is big, bright, and crisp at 1080p, and that’s what’s most important for smart glasses right now. I’ve found far more use out of these devices as simple wearable displays than as a self-contained virtual workstation, and as a monitor you can wear on your face, the Luma Pro excels.