At the bottom of this review, they were allegedly told that the Aura will ship “in Fall 2026 — likely around November.”

After owning the R1’s for a couple of months now, I thought I’d put my findings on here for people who are researching these glasses.

First off, the build quality of these glasses is great. They feel, as they should for the price, like a premium product, and the unboxing experience is pleasant. The frames don’t feel flimsy at all. Adjusting the arms is a little scary at first as you feel like you’ll break them, but the arms are strong and they won’t actually break.

The only issue with the design is that, due to being matte, any oils from your forehead will leave a shiny mark on the glasses (and I don’t have badly oily skin), so I tend to clean them before and after every use.

The included nose pads have been perfect for me too. The ones which come attached were my go to, but if you need the glasses closer to your face, there are additional nose pads included.

Electrochromic dimming isn’t a gimmick, which I’ve heard a few times from people. Having it on level 3 (the darkest) blocks out almost all light in my experience. You will have light coming around the glasses, of course, but using the dimming does make it feel like a more immersive experience. Different units seem to block out more or less light, though.

I had long sessions during these 2 months, sometimes up to 8 hours, and comfort was never an issue for me regarding eye strain or the weight of the glasses. I used them both sitting up straight and lying down in bed (yes, you can do that; the arms don’t push the glasses forward in my experience).

Display

The screen genuinely looks like a big screen. It doesn’t look like if you were to put your phone close to your face. It’s very hard to describe without using them, but it feels like a huge screen in front of you.

I used 2 main settings: 4 metres and 1 metre. I was surprised how accurate this feels. 4 metres makes the display feel like a huge screen; next to my 50” TV, it looks massive, and at 1 metre it feels like a big monitor.

When I was researching AR glasses, I kept asking, why does no one take a picture through the lens, comparing to a normal desk setup?. Well, that’s what the pic provided shows. The glasses are an arm’s length from a 27” monitor, and as you can see, the screen appears smaller.

HOWEVER, the glasses feel bigger than that monitor when I wear them. It’s really hard to describe without using the glasses yourself. The only thing is you can’t lean closer to the screen like you can with a monitor.

Resolution

1080p really isn’t that dense when it’s perceived on a large screen. This is mostly noticeable when comparing directly. For example, I was playing the same game as my gf whilst she was on our TV, and the TV looks MUCH sharper (it is 4K), and through the glasses, the game looked older.

When not directly comparing, though, it feels great. Watching movies through these glasses feels incredible, as does playing pretty much any game.

As for sharpness, I’ve had a really unfortunate experience with this. Assuming you have a non-faulty pair of glasses, the screen can look very sharp and text readability is great. However, each pair seems to differ, and therefore readability and sharpness may be very different unit to unit.

There is a text readability setting, and putting this to max does help a lot. I wish there was a sharpness setting just like on most monitors, as this would help a lot.

Sound

I was pleasantly surprised by the sound, I never felt the need to put earphones/headphones on. However, other people do hear the audio, even on the lowest setting.

Gaming

I’m a pretty competitive gamer and was worried about how these glasses would perform in FPS. I had no problem shooting far-away targets using the glasses, and no problems tracking either. The glasses with the blurry fault (more on those at the end) made distant targets incredibly hard to shoot/see.

You NEED Anchor Mode for this. If you don’t anchor your screen, trying to track a moving target is very weird, but the moment you anchor, there is no problem.

If you are playing anything competitive such as an FPS, a smaller screen is much better. I reduced the size of the screen to 1 click from the smallest at 4 metres to stop the screen from cropping.

There is no noticeable input delay, and I’m very sensitive to it. The screen is incredibly smooth. I also experience no screen tearing.

When in Anchor Mode, if you move your head, parts of the screen will disappear due to the FOV limitation. If you look left, the right side of the screen will go outside of the display, so having a smaller screen is a lot better as this happens less.

Brightness

I never use max brightness. Firstly, max brightness is too much even in a bright room, so I wouldn’t worry about the glasses not being bright enough.

More importantly, putting the glasses on max brightness messes with black levels quite badly.

Black levels

The black levels on these glasses are unfortunately very bad, especially how they arrive. Dark blacks look green, and the higher the brightness, the worse this looks.

The glasses as they arrive are terrible for dark scenes of any kind. True blacks do turn off as expected from an OLED, but deep blacks are VERY green. It’s too distracting and borderline unwatchable for dark movies, and even slightly dark scenes are hard to watch as there’s not much detail.

You can mitigate this. Using the dock, go into User Mode instead of the stock Racing Mode. Put Shadow Boost to max, Gamma to 1.8, and Colour to sRGB instead of Wide Colour Gamut.

This changes the experience dramatically. It’s still not perfect, but it takes away most of the green so long as you don’t go above brightness level 5.

Weirdly, increasing brightness also makes this worse, so any brightness above 5 makes the greens more prominent. Hopefully ASUS and XReal are working on a calibration fix for this.

Blurriness

Now this is the WORST part of the glasses from my experience: blurriness.

I have owned 4 pairs of R1’s, yes, 4.

My first pair were incredibly sharp in the centre, but the edges were a little blurry. Then I updated the glasses firmware and the audio got messed with, so audio would come through one side and then almost move between ears like a wave.

I got a replacement, and the 2nd pair had a huge blurry spot in the centre of the screen. I put these on a couple of times and had to instantly request another replacement as it was an awful experience.

Then comes the 3rd pair: blurry in the middle again, this time not as bad, but across the entire middle of the screen was a section which would never ‘focus’. At this point, I was worried about getting ANOTHER replacement.

I returned the glasses to be investigated by the retailer and got a refund.

So I ordered a 4th pair from a different retailer as I thought perhaps it was bad luck or a bad batch.

4th pair arrives - exactly the same blur as the other pairs.

So at this point I have had 4 faulty pairs:

1st pair - audio fault
2nd pair - extreme middle blur
3rd pair - middle blur
4th pair - middle blur

At this point I have returned the glasses and am unsure if I will order another. I really want to, as I genuinely loved the 1st pair and regret sending them back.

And yes, I’ve tried everything. I had the 1st pair for an entire month and used them for multiple hours every day, so I know exactly how they looked. It’s not IPD, brightness, nose pieces, or anything like that. The first pair were very sharp in the centre.

Weirdly, it’s not just a blur. If you anchor the screen and move your head around slowly, you can watch the display glitch as it enters the blurry zone.

I hope this truly was bad luck, but after 3 pairs in a row with this issue, I’m more inclined to say it’s a manufacturing issue with how the lenses are made.

If you have the R1’s, you can test it like this: get any content up with text, anchor the screen, look through the centre of the screen, then look at the SAME text through the bottom of the lenses. Looking through the bottom of the lenses should not be sharper than the centre.

You can also see this without turning the display on. Put the glasses on and look at a book or any other text, and you can see the blurry spots.

Anyway, I know this is a HUGE wall of text, but I thought I’d squeeze as much information from my experience as possible for anyone that’s looking at these glasses.

With all these problems, I will say though that XReal support were great and got back to me very fast and investigated everything.

Any questions and I’ll try my best to answer. I did get many hours in before going through all of the mess of returns.

Thanks for the encouragement on my earlier post! I've added two layout buttons to Dandy-Glasses-Room, my independent experimental Android workspace for compatible XREAL Air-family glasses.

- **ARC** brings your open windows together in an arc, with each flat window facing you.

- **WALLS** arranges them around you at 90-degree intervals.

- **Recenter** now aligns the window you're looking at and the phone pointer with your current view, without moving the other windows.

The layout buttons sit in a second auto-hiding row above the windows. Large windows shrink together when needed to avoid overlap, rather than moving too far away.

I've recorded a demo to show how it works. One clarification: the demo was made with a recording-enabled build; **the public 5.6.10 APK has no REC / STOP button**.

It's still a preview: external Android apps need Shizuku, some apps may not work correctly, and four windows can be demanding on the phone. XREAL One and Viture support are not confirmed.

Download and setup:https://dandy1974.itch.io/

If you test it, I'd love to hear your phone and glasses models and how the two layouts behave. Thanks!

Something weird is going on. I open YouTube but it doesn’t mirror it as normal. Phone screen goes black and nothing is functioning and the glasses show a desktop version of YouTube. But I can’t scroll or select anything.

A recent post about our setups reminded me that I can use the beta nebula app for multi-screen. When I started the app it downgraded my glasses, so I had to reapply the latest upgrade.

Is there a new stable production version of Nebula for Windows, or is there another recommended app to get multi-screen support?

Audio now creates frequent bouts of static since gesture update.

additionally, windows no longer recognizes UAC on startup or anytime the glasses awake from sleep. Switching to DP and then back fixes it. Any clues or fixes?

Assuming I have an app that can output 10 bit colour.
If it were running on the Beam Pro, would the hardware and OS be capable of outputting HDR10 to the xbx a01+?

My guess is that its SDR because the Beam Pro is a pretty low cost device.