Google and Xreal’s ‘Project Aura’ XR Smart Glasses Are Legit

I got here to Google I/O 2026 to check out Google and Xreal’s “Project Aura” XR good glasses and I’m glad to report that I received greater than 90 seconds with them.

Launching globally this 12 months, Project Aura is a pair of XR good glasses that run on Google’s Android XR spatial platform. While neither firm shared particulars on pricing or a selected launch date but, media like myself did get to demo them to get a style of what to anticipate. They’re precisely as I anticipated them to be: a midway level between the displayless good glasses like Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses (and Google’s and Samsung’s new “audio glasses”) and a extra immersive headset just like the Vision Pro or Galaxy XR. You get “spatial computing” expertise in a pair of compact frames.

Slipping them onto my face, Project Aura felt no totally different than Xreal’s One Pro AR glasses. Other than the three cameras (the one within the nostril bridge is for images and movies, and those on the edges are used for hand monitoring), they regarded and felt just about the identical—tremendous gentle and in no way uncomfortable. That’s what we wish, trigger few persons are gonna strap a cumbersome headset to their face.

There’s a cable that connects to the left arm that plugs right into a “compute puck” that you would be able to then put on round your neck with an connected lanyard. The puck itself resembled the battery pack for the Vision Pro. There’s additionally a trackpad on the floor of the puck, however I wasn’t capable of strive that out.

Once arrange, I did a brief demo to learn to use the hand monitoring. It’s pretty easy: simply attain out and pinch objects to pick out them and pinch and maintain to tug them round. The one factor that Project Aura doesn’t have is eye monitoring, which suggests you’ll have to flip your complete head after which attain out to pick out issues inside your “spatial” view.

That spatial view is the widest that I’ve seen on a pair of good glasses, and it makes an enormous distinction if you anchor a display or a number of apps in entrance of your imaginative and prescient. At 70 levels, the FOV is large sufficient to comfortably see three app home windows open subsequent to one another. I’m instructed that as much as 5 app home windows may be open directly. At one level, I had three apps open after which a sport above them. Just don’t anticipate the type of enclosed immersion that you simply get from XR headsets.

The screens are additionally fairly vibrant, too. They’re sharp sufficient that visuals and textual content didn’t look pixelated or laborious to make out in any respect. Unfortunately, I don’t have data on show sort, decision, or refresh price. Adding a excessive refresh price, just like the 240Hz within the Asus ROG Xreal R1 gaming-focused good glasses, would solely add to the price. For what it’s value, Xreal has solely ever shipped good glasses with a 1080p decision and its premium units have micro OLED panels.

The Project Aura {hardware} is the most effective that XR glasses may be proper now, and it’ll be the worst it’ll ever be after we look again on them sooner or later. What’s extra vital is the XR software program expertise. How does Android XR and Gemini Intelligence work on Project Aura? Based on my transient demo, it’s so much much less gimmicky than I used to be anticipating.

While the hand monitoring wasn’t excellent—there have been a number of instances the place I attempted grabbing app home windows just for the good glasses to not acknowledge my fingers—it labored properly sufficient. For probably the most half, I may shortly and simply pinch home windows and toss them round in my area of view—all whereas controlling the quantity of dimming I needed with a press on the pink button on the best arm. Grabbing an app’s nook additionally introduced up a method to resize them, just like clicking on the nook of a window on a desktop. In one demo, I checked out a bunch of objects on a bookshelf, and Gemini may inform me about every one.

My favourite demo was for gaming. We loaded up the role-play sport Demeo, and I may make a fist with each fingers to seize the entire stage and rotate it round or enlarge or shrink it. The pinch gesture was used to seize my character and transfer them across the board. Opening my proper palm introduced up a bunch of playing cards that I may then choose with my left hand after which drop onto my character to carry out an assault or spell. It was actually cool! If the hand monitoring ever will get extra responsive, I may see some actual innovation in gameplay for video games like Dungeons & Dragons or Minecraft. It simply felt extra immersive and intuitive than utilizing a controller or mouse for controls.

I used to be additionally proven how Project Aura might be used as an exterior monitor for a laptop computer. After plugging a USB-C cable from the laptop computer into the compute puck, I used to be capable of prolong the laptop computer’s display to the good glasses. This was the jankiest of the demos. I wasn’t capable of transfer apps between the bodily and digital screens in any respect, though I used to be instructed I may.

I’ll reduce Google and Xreal some slack for now. Project Aura clearly wants some polish on the Android XR entrance. I simply hope that among the bugginess will get ironed out earlier than the XR good glasses launch. We’re virtually mid-year, so there’s not a complete lot of time left until they’re launching nearer to the tip of the 12 months.

Overall, I’ll say that I left my demo optimistic. With Apple supposedly designing itself right into a nook with the Vision Pro, I’ve to wonder if we really want that stage of immersion for spatial computing. How many individuals are pining for a computing expertise that’s extra isolating? Not me. At the very least, I can say that the compactness of Project Aura is promising for the XR good glasses class. Maybe much less is extra for XR good glasses and dimension and luxury will finally matter greater than visible constancy. Price will matter too. Few individuals paid $3,500 for Vision Pro, and few individuals will pony up for Project Aura in the event that they’re too costly.