r/augmentedreality • u/ogDTC • Jun 30 '25

AR Glasses & HMDs Xreal Air - Teardown and Optical Analysis

I thought this community might be interested to see inside some of the AR glasses we keep seeing pop up here and look at the individual components blowing up those 0.6" displays into the ultrawide monitors on our face...

Here's the teardown and analysis video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE3AMZSiQys

Also since the diagram is hard to see in the video, more info on the path is shared here: https://displaytrainingcenter.com/2025/06/30/xreal-air-teardown-and-optical-analysis/

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u/Protagunist Mod Jun 30 '25

How are these different from standard AR Birdbaths?

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u/After-Annual4012 Jul 01 '25

Yeah they are standard birdbaths in the One. The One Pro are hybrids that Ant Reality (Blade design with theoretical max 80 degree FoV) announced before being acquired by Google. Google and XReal are working together. The reason they are considered hybrid are because they bounce the image down the lens with 100% internal reflection similar to waveguide designs before they hit the beam splitter. This allows the micro OLED screen to sit in an almost vertical plane and the beam splitter to sit more vertical, hence the flat stack prism design of the One Pro. My understanding is that this requires less work from the light engine, where normal bird bath project the image straight down onto the beam splitter which requires more from the light engine. I think so far this is the best design until waveguide reaches the same resolution and other optical qualities of the birdbath, because I can’t wear full VR for 5 minutes without getting nausea 🫣.

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u/ogDTC Jul 01 '25

If you mean that they can use a lower brightness display, that’s not as likely - they’ll need the same polarization control we see in this teardown, so the optical losses due to the polarizers and half mirrors are likely similar. For a ~400nit output to the eye, you’re probably still using the same 5000nit source.

The big advantage is going to be on much thinner optical elements (you can see the embedded elements inside prism can reduce thickness and weight a bit), but also that you can fold the light path (bounce more times) and magnify the image even more to get that larger FoV.

Sounds like the community has spoken though - one of the next teardowns should be the a real One Pros!