"Is it a headset? Smart glasses? Both? Those were the questions running through my head as I held Project Aura in my hands in a recent demo. It looked like a pair of chunky sunglasses, except for the cord dangling off the left side, leading down to a battery pack that also served as a trackpad. When I asked, Google's reps told me they consider it a headset masquerading as glasses. They have a term for it, too: wired XR glasses."
"I can connect wirelessly to a laptop and create a giant virtual desktop in my space. I have up to a 70-degree field of view. My first task is to launch Lightroom on the virtual desktop while opening YouTube in another window. I play a 3D tabletop game where I can pinch and pull the board to zoom in and out. I look at a painting on the wall and summon Circle to Search. Gemini tells me the name of the artwork and the artist."
"I've done all of this before in the Vision Pro and Galaxy XR. This time, my head isn't stuffed into a bulky headset. If I wore this in public, most people wouldn't notice. But this isn't augmented reality, which overlays digital information over the real world. It's much more like using a Galaxy XR, where you see apps in front of you and your surroundings."
Project Aura is a collaboration between Xreal and Google and is expected to launch in 2026. The device resembles chunky sunglasses with a cord to a battery pack that doubles as a trackpad and is described by Google as wired XR glasses. Project Aura can connect wirelessly to a laptop to create a large virtual desktop with up to a 70-degree field of view and run multiple apps, games, and tools like Circle to Search and Gemini. The experience is similar to Galaxy XR and Vision Pro, favoring virtual app overlays rather than true augmented reality overlays on the real world.
Read at The Verge
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]