Project Aura XR, launching globally this year, is a pair of smart glasses that run on Google’s Android XR spatial platform. Although neither company has shared details about pricing or a specific release date yet, media like me got to try the demo to get an idea of what to expect. They’re exactly what I expected them to be: a halfway point between displayless smart glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses (and Google and Samsung’s new “audio glasses”) and more immersive headsets like the Vision Pro or Galaxy XR. You get the “spatial computing” experience in a pair of compact frames.
Slipping them on my face, Project Aura felt no different than Xreal’s One Pro AR glasses. Apart from the three cameras (one in the bridge of the nose is for photos and video, and the ones on the side are used for hand tracking), they looked and felt pretty much the same – super light and not at all uncomfortable. That’s what we want, because very few people strap a bulky headset to their face.
There’s a cable that connects to the left arm that plugs into a “compute puck” that you can wear around your neck with an attached lanyard. The puck itself looked like the battery pack of the Vision Pro. There’s also a trackpad on the surface of the puck, but I wasn’t able to try it out.
Once installed, I did a short demo to learn how to use hand tracking. It’s pretty straightforward: just reach out and pinch objects to select them and pinch and hold to drag them around. One thing Project Aura doesn’t have is eye tracking, which means you have to turn your entire head and then reach out to select things within your “spatial” view.
That spatial view is the widest I’ve seen on a pair of smart glasses, and it makes a big difference when you have a screen or multiple apps in front of your vision. At 70 degrees, the FOV is wide enough to comfortably view three app windows open next to each other. I’m told that up to five app windows can be opened at once. At one point, I had three apps open and then a game on top of them. Just don’t expect the kind of immersive immersion you get from an XR headset.
The screens are also quite bright. They’re so fast that visuals and text don’t look pixelated or difficult to understand at all. Unfortunately, I don’t have information about display type, resolution, or refresh rate. Adding a higher refresh rate like 240Hz inside the Asus ROG Xreal R1 gaming-focused smart glasses will only increase the cost. For what it’s worth, Xreal has only shipped 1080p resolution smart glasses so far and its premium devices feature micro OLED panels.
The Project Aura hardware might be the best of the XR glasses right now, and it might be the worst yet when we look at them in the future. What is more important is the XR software experience. How do Android XR and Gemini Intelligence work on Project Aura? Based on my brief demo, it’s a lot less gimmicky than I expected.
Although the hand tracking wasn’t perfect — several times I tried to hold up app windows so that the smart glasses wouldn’t recognize my hands — it worked well enough. For the most part, I could quickly and easily pinch the windows and bounce them around in my field of view — all while controlling the amount of dimming I desired by pressing the red button on the right arm. Grabbing a corner of an app also introduced a way to resize them, similar to clicking the corner of a window on desktop. In one demo, I saw a bunch of items on a bookshelf, and Gemini could tell me about each one.
My favorite demo was for gaming. We loaded the role-play game Demio, And I could make a fist with both hands to grab the entire level and move it around or make it larger or smaller. The pinch gesture was used to grab my character and move them around the board. Opening my right palm revealed a bunch of cards that I could select with my left hand and then drop onto my character to attack or cast a spell. It was really great! If hand tracking ever becomes more responsive, I could see some real innovation in gameplay like dungeons and dragons Or minecraft. It felt more immersive and intuitive than using a controller or mouse for control.
I was also shown how Project Aura can be used as an external monitor for a laptop. After plugging the USB-C cable from the laptop into the Compute Puck, I was able to extend the laptop’s screen to the smart glasses. This was the liveliest demo. I wasn’t able to move apps between the physical and virtual screens at all, even though I was told I could do so.
I’ll just give Google and Xreal some slack. Project Aura clearly needs some improvements on the Android XR front. I just hope that some of the shortcomings are ironed out before the XR smart glasses are launched. We’re almost mid-year, so there’s not much time left until they launch closer to the end of the year.
Overall, I’d say I left my demo optimistic. With Apple reportedly designing itself into a corner with the Vision Pro, I have to wonder if we really need that level of immersion for spatial computing. How many people are looking for a computing experience that is more isolated? Not me. At least, I can say that the compactness of Project Aura is promising for the XR smart glasses category. Perhaps less is more for the XR smart glasses and size and comfort will ultimately matter more than visual fidelity. Price will also matter. Few people have paid $3,500 for the Vision Pro, and even fewer will buy Project Aura if it’s too expensive.
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