AND thVRsday
In it weekly columnAndroid Central Senior Content Producer Nick Sutrich explores VR, from new hardware to new games, upcoming technologies and more.
It’s been a long time coming, but we finally got it Xreal Project Aura is in action at Google I/O 2026. Hybrid smart glasses are designed to deliver a VR experience in a smart glasses form factor, so you full the power of Android XR Platform without the bulk of VR headsets. Project Aura incorporates dual displays (one on each lens), speakers and cameras to deliver an enhanced smart glasses experience.
Xreal still equips the Aura glasses with an improved X1S chip and a set of cameras that allow you to spatially track your position, so you can get a full VR spatial experience. This improved X1S chip focuses on improved speed and multitasking compared to the X1 chip in the current generation Xreal One glasses.
It is fundamentally different from all other smart glasses
Xreal released many first official details After yesterday’s Google I/O 2026 show, Project Aura, a full year after its initial presentation at last year’s I/O. During a product briefing ahead of I/O 2026, Xreal told me to expect the glasses to make their commercial debut this year. Will it be next to that? New AI glasses developed by Samsung it’s in the fall or a little closer to the holidays.
Since the information was released on Tuesday afternoon, there has been some confusion about how Project Aura works. These glasses are not the same as the current generation glasses Xreal 1S or Viture Beast. These glasses are simply a wearable monitor that can be connected to another device such as your phone, laptop, or even a device like the Nintendo Switch 2.
Xreal Project Aura, though, is designed entirely for solo use also it doubles as a wearable monitor if you want. But normally, you’ll get it by plugging it into the computing drive I mentioned above full Android XR experience. This means full spatial tracking of your surroundings and hand tracking (to enable natural movement and interaction), plus support for all available Android 2D and spatial apps.
You can see it in action at the link below (skip to 12:16 if the link doesn’t do it for you).
The puck itself looks like a phone, but it’s not. This is a clear evolution of 2024 Xreal Beam Proincluding dual USB-C ports on the bottom.
Xreal has not announced a specific Snapdragon chipset for its compute drive. Still, as it’s designed to deliver the full Android XR experience, it’ll be more capable than the chipsets in the all-in-one XR glasses. Ray-Ban Display or even monocular display glasses powered by Google and Samsung.
Project Aura has a 70-degree field of view (FoV), which is about 15 degrees wider than the best smart glasses available today, but still about 20-30 degrees narrower than VR headsets. Meta Quest 3. Whether you want to play VR games regularly for this is still unknown, but glasses are a must. perfect for mixed reality games which superimposes virtual objects on the real world or uses the real world as a background.
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Based on the hands-on time of Android Central managing editor Derrek Lee and notes analyst Anshel Sagit’s clear that Xreal and Google have done impressive work to transform the VR experience into a brilliant pair of smart glasses. Sag says the narrower FoV is impressive and translates it Galaxy XR practice with devotion. As a regular Galaxy XR user, this is what I was hoping to hear!
In addition, the image quality and performance seem to be on par with the headset for everyday tasks. Because there are glasses Twins built in, they can detect faces and automatically dim the screen so you can better see the person standing in front of you, and it feels more like a magical floating display.
Project Aura doesn’t have a final product name, price, or specific release date, but we expect it to launch later this year, likely at a similar (or slightly higher) price to the new Xreal ROG R1 glasses announced last week. Xreal ships the first 1,000 devkits for free, which means there’s no real investment for developers to start building Android XR location apps right now. The future is visible a lot it’s brilliant for the technology, and Aura will lead the way in the next big XR push.
