The XReal One elevated the category of AR smart glasses at the beginning of this year with motion tracking and a built-in interface, and the company is taking things further with the XReal One Pro. This step-up model has all of the same features as its slightly older sibling, but with a new micro-OLED projection system that displays the widest field of view I’ve seen in this category. At $650, the XReal One Pro is a fair bit more expensive than the $500 One, but it delivers the most expansive picture you can put in front of your eyes without strapping on a full headset, earning it our Editors’ Choice award for AR smart glasses.

Design: Seemingly Simple Sunglasses

The XReal One Pro looks almost identical to the XReal One, and can easily be mistaken for a slightly chunky pair of black sunglasses. A thin, glossy black front frame holds two smoke-tinted outward-facing lenses that can lighten or dim depending on whether you need to keep an eye on the real world around you or you want more isolation and higher contrast while viewing media. The lens-dimming feature carries over from the One (and is also available on the Viture Pro), and is a nice perk that means you don’t have to deal with a snap-on sunshade or be committed to clear or dark lenses at all times.

Somewhat thick black temples extend from chrome-colored spring hinges and house the One Pro’s physical controls and most of its hardware. Each temple widens out to a slight bulge holding speaker grilles before narrowing into curved ear hooks, of which the left hook features a USB-C port for connecting the glasses. A brightness rocker and menu button sit on the underside of the right temple, with a shortcut button sitting on the top, opposite the menu button.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The bridge of the One Pro has a set of removable silicone nose pads on adjustable metal arms, with three pairs in different sizes included. It also features mounting points for prescription lens inserts and a connector for the XReal Eye accessory, which I’ll get to in a moment. The large nose pads, spring hinges, and curved ear hooks make the One Pro comfortable to wear; I didn’t find it to pinch my head or sit at an awkward angle relative to the display at all. At 3.1 ounces, it’s on the slightly heavier side, but by a fairly imperceptible amount. The One weighs 2.9 ounces, and the Viture Pro weighs 2.7 ounces, and I have a difficult time noticing any additional heft when wearing the One Pro compared with them.

If you wear corrective lenses, you’ll have to order prescription lens inserts. XReal doesn’t produce the inserts directly, but a frame is included that you can take to an optometrist. You can also order online from Hons VR for a listed price of $149 (on sale for $49.95 at the time of this writing). I greatly prefer the diopter adjustment dials on smart glasses like the Rokid Max 2 and Viture Pro, since they let nearsighted users like me see in focus without spending extra on prescription lenses. XReal sent me a pair of prescription inserts from Hons VR for testing with the One Pro, and they sharpened my view just as well as my regular glasses.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

In addition to a USB-C cable, nose pads, and the prescription lens frame insert, a pill-shaped hard-shell case and microfiber cloth are included with the One Pro.

Features: Plenty of AR Tricks, Including 6DOF Tracking

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. 

(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.

(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.

Picture Quality: A Sharp, Sweeping View

The XReal One Pro uses a more advanced 0.55-inch micro-OLED projector than the One’s 0.69-inch projector. It has the same 1080p resolution that’s standard with almost all AR smart glasses of its type, but at 57 degrees, it has the widest field of view I’ve seen in the category (and significantly wider than the One’s 50 degrees). Its 700 nits light output is also brighter than the One’s 600 nits, though neither is as bright as the Viture Pro (1,000 nits, but with a 46-degree field of view). Like the One, the One Pro has a 120Hz top refresh rate.

Picture quality is the most important aspect of AR smart glasses, and here the XReal One Pro truly shines thanks to its sweeping field of view. It shows the widest picture I’ve seen in smart glasses by far, taking up an impressive amount of my vision. It’s noticeably bigger than the XReal One’s and Rokid Max 2’s displays, and much larger than the Viture Pro’s. The difference in screen size feels a lot like upgrading from a 55- or 65-inch TV to a 75-inch one. You can watch all of them comfortably, but the bigger screen really adds to the experience.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Spreading the same number of pixels across a wider space means the 1080p One Pro isn’t going to be quite as sharp as smart glasses with a narrower field of view, but its picture is still very crisp. Text is very easy to read on it, and I had no problems using it as a wearable monitor when working on the go.

Color and contrast are also excellent. The picture is bright enough to comfortably view under any ambient lighting, short of outdoors on a sunny day, with deep and detailed shadows if the exterior lenses or your surroundings are properly dark. The Viture Pro puts out a fair bit more light at maximum settings, but the One Pro is not remotely dim. It’s very vibrant, comparable with the Viture Pro in saturation, though the budget-priced RayNeo Air 3s is oddly a bit more vivid than either.

Bose-designed speakers aimed at your ears provide the One Pro with audio. If you’re in a quiet location, they sound quite good for the category, but they still have the same weaknesses that all sound-equipped smart glasses suffer from. Having a physical air gap between the ear and the speaker allows for almost no bass or noise isolation. Whatever you’re listening to can potentially be heard by anyone sitting next to you. If the environment allows it, though, the speakers offer clean and relatively full-sounding audio, with dialogue coming through clearly.