This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/samsungdex by /u/Hey_look_new on 2023-08-06 21:29:24.
For the last year or so, we've been seeing several users show off their hi-tech portable DeX setups, featuring a variety of Head Mounted Displays (HMD). After some initial reaching out, and chasing, we managed to start a conversation with the folks over at XREAL. They were super receptive to a bit of a partnership, and including the DeX community in their growing endeavor.
XREAL airs and DeX - a portable productivity match
XREAL sent over a pair of their XREAL air AR Glasses () for myself and /u/mrp_yt to trial out and comment on for our subreddit. As always, we're not journalists, but will attempt to provide honest, meaningful feedback for our community, and XREAL. They don't have any editorial control over the review, and will see it for the first time, at the same moment it's publicly available to all.
Ok, so now with all the preamble out of the way, lets get down to the nuts and bolts of these glasses!
SPECS
The airs are black, and resemble regular sunglasses from a distance. An up-close look will give them away, but they're far from the ski mask aesthetic of VR headsets.
They're not a ski mask, but it will be obvious they're not just sunglasses either
The lenses do have a TUV Certificate of Eye Protection, and if you're wearing them while walking about, they're light enough (72g) that they do just feel like normal sunglasses.
The fancy OLED lenses are bird bath style optics, which is a type of display technology that provides a larger field of view (FOV) with reduced distortion, making it ideal for AR glasses; providing a 46° diagonal FOV and a large, crisp 1080p image. The lenses provide 400 nits of brightness. The glasses are plenty bright for indoor use, but end up fairly transparent if used outside. They do include a clip on blackout shade, but this precludes you from walking around.
The glasses have a 4.0m focal point. What this means is that if you need glasses to watch tv, you'll likely need contacts or the Rx lens inserts. You CAN cram them over your regular glasses, and it works, but I'd not recommend this at all. I spent the first week alternating between glasses and contacts, and just bit the bullet and got the lens inserts. it's a MUCH better experience, even if it adds to the cost of the glasses.
The glasses connect to your device via a single USB-C cable (provided) that connects to the left arm of the glasses. This arm DOES get warm when in use, but not overly. After 2-3 hours of watching a movie, or gaming, you can tell it's warm, but I've never reached a stage where I felt like it was a problem, or even bothersome.
The arms also contain stereo speakers. They're not overly loud, but because they're positioned right over your ears, the audio sounds great. You will NOT need ear buds with the glasses, but wireless ear buds will also work great if you want to keep everything private.
Wearing the airs
Like all glasses, the fit is going to be super personal, and every head is a different size, and shape. You may even discover, to your own surprise, your ears aren't level, and you need to adjust the arms of the glasses separately to get a level screen!
The good news is that the glasses do have some ability to customize their fit. The arms themselves have some flexibility IN/OUT to accommodate different width of heads. The arms have 3 clickable positions to adjust the angle of the ear pieces. I found that I needed to click the right arm down twice, and the left arm down once, to make my lopsided ears even for the image.
XREAL also includes 3 different nose pieces in the box (1 installed on glasses to start with)
Extra Nose pads to adjust how the glasses fit
Like any glasses, they're used to adjust how high off your nose, the lenses sit. Unlike normal glasses, it's SUPER OBVIOUS when you've got them sitting too high, or too low. It makes it look like your screen is cropped. Once you find the sweet spot tho, the picture is glorious.
Extra nose piece.
Using the airs
So while one of the bigger selling points of the XREAL glasses is the AR abilities, I'm honestly going to mostly downplay that in this review. 99% of my use is straight HMD for DeX. The AR scene is just getting started, and I feel like it's fairly....generous..... at this stage, to call it in Beta.
The other caveat is that you can use DeX, or you can use Nebula. Samsung has locked out certain functions from being access from Nebula, because Samsung is really helpful that way. (Just like they make super awesome decisions about which phones get DeX, what resolutions they allow, etc etc) I hope you can hear my eyes rolling from your side of the screen. This restriction is wholly on Samsung.
Nebula is the name of the AR app for XREAL, and current progress on Windows and MAC looks really promising, android development is a whole other ball of wax, and while a good proof of concept, it's still not particularly viable right now. Nebula is the magic that allows multiple monitors to be pinned in space. So with that out of the way, let's get to actual DeX use.
Connecting the airs to DeX is straight forward. Simple USB-C cable from phone/tablet to the airs. This prompts DeX to launch, and you instantly have a beautiful OLED projection in front of your eyes. Because of how the optics of perception work, the size of the image is subjective. Sitting at my office desk, facing my monitors, with a wall directly behind, the image appears to be about a 30" screen. I have multiple 27" 1200p screens, and it's slightly larger than those.
Sitting on my couch, facing my TV, in my normal spot, the XREAL image fills the entire wall. I have a 55" TV there, and it's absolutely dwarfed. XREAL initially claimed it was a 201" display, but honestly, that's really underselling how BIG the picture appears.
the XREAL air image basically fills this 14 foot wall
One of the more interesting uses for glasses has been as a tutorial white space.
By that I mean, since the "Screen" is somewhat see-through (depending on your lighting), you can have a tutorial video playing, while you look thru the glasses to see what you're working on.
/u/mrp_yt has made many happy noises about being able to get fiddly projects completed while viewing the tutorial and working on it at the same time.
For myself, I've spent a lot of time trying to incorporate the glasses into various day to day tasks, and work flow. They're especially great for media consumption.
There's not a whole lot better than a 300" cinema strapped to your face, while in a hammock, in a national forest....
Lying or sitting in a hammock, watching a show is a pretty great experience. Like all DeX flow, the screen turns into your trackpad and/or soft keyboard and it's really easy to navigate the familiar DeX interface.
Likewise, XREAL + Steam Deck is also a fairly seamless integration. Same single cable solution, the deck screen turns off, and appears on the glasses. Having all the hardware controls of the Steam Deck still active is a pretty great experience. The only downside, is if you REQUIRE an accurate touchscreen event, it can be a bit awful. Easy solution is to temporarily disconnect the glasses, hit the touchscreen button, and reconnect. it's fairly seamless that way
Added bonus for the steam deck is that you now have a 1080p60 (or 120hz) screen to use with it, rather than just the 800p60 on the deck itself.
The one major DOWNSIDE of the airs
They need power. They're not incredibly power hungry, but they do require a power draw from your device. My s21 Ultra, when idle, with the screen on, reports -180 to -250 mA of power draw via Ampere. When connected to the airs, power drain basically triples. it draws -590 to -630 mA, with a maximum of -1780mA during initial DeX launch.
Launching an actual move via plex results in about a -800mA draw. Watching the same movie on the DeX device itself is a -350mA power output.
You're definitely going notice the effect on your battery while using the glasses.
The Steam Deck can be even fussier. Without tinkering with it's power profile settings, it will just simply shut the glasses off at ~50% battery. You can adjust this if it's too aggressive for you, but it's definitely something to keep in mind.
Luckily there is a relatively simple solution for this. I've added the Nubia RedMagic dock to my tech bag. it ...
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/SamsungDex/comments/15jy85j/long_term_xreal_air_review_for_dex_and_steam_deck/
