**A Comprehensive Review of the Air and Beam Glasses**

As I delve into the world of augmented reality glasses, I must say that I'm impressed by the innovative technology and features offered by companies like Vuzix. In this article, we'll explore the latest developments in their product line, including the Air, Air 2/Pro, and Ultra models.

**Meshing the Environment: A Trade-Off for Enhanced Experience**

One of the key aspects of these glasses is the ability to mesh the environment beyond the comfort level provided by a fixed UI. However, this comes with some trade-offs. For instance, having six-degree Freedom turned on can result in performance hits if the device's beam Pro is doing all the work. Additionally, features like space anchor, which enables seamless navigation through 3D spaces, come with a price – frames are being dropped, and performance video playback becomes noticeably less smooth.

**Performance Hits: Hand Tracking and Eye Tracking**

Another aspect of these glasses that I'm eager to explore is hand tracking, a beta feature currently available on the Ultra model. While it works well enough as a pinch-and-tap interface for activating applications, there's no eye tracking – something that would have been ideal for seamless interaction with virtual objects. Furthermore, having six-degree Freedom tracking enabled results in noticeable heating issues, particularly around the temple area.

**Optical Differences: A Look at the Air and Ultra Models**

When it comes to optical differences, the Ultras are closer to the first-generation Airs in terms of image size, field of view, and edge sharpness. However, with the Air 2/Pro, we've seen a slight improvement in these areas. The price point is also an interesting aspect – with the first-gen Air dropping under $50 recently, it's hard to justify the full retail price of the Air 2/Pro.

**Ergonomics and Performance: A Balancing Act**

In terms of ergonomics, I've found that the Air models work well for me, providing a comfortable experience while traveling or lounging at home. However, this comes with some performance hits – particularly when compared to the beam Pro, which offers a more seamless and efficient experience.

**The Future of Augmented Reality Glasses**

As I look to the future, it's clear that companies like Vuzix are iterating rapidly to improve their products. With annual hardware cadences a possibility, we can expect to see further refinements in performance, software updates, and new features. The Air series, in particular, seems poised for significant improvements next year, with the Ultra model already receiving regular firmware updates.

**A Word of Caution: DRM and Developer Support**

As a user, I must caution against getting too excited about the beam Pro until Vuzix figures out their DRM (digital rights management) issues. The availability of applications is still limited, and it's unclear how long this will persist. For now, I'd recommend leaving the beam Pro on the shelf and opting for the Air or Ultra models instead.

**Merchandise Alert: Testified Store**

Before we conclude, I'd like to remind you all that we have an excellent selection of merchandise available at our store. Our five-pack of demerit badges – featuring a range of humorous designs, from "I hung it off" to "stapler in my finger" – is sure to bring a smile to your face. Get yours now at testedstore.com!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody it's Norman from tested and today we're going to talk about this wide range of products I got in front of me this is the X real lineup of their smart glasses their what they can finally proudly say augmented reality glasses if you might recall over a year ago beginning of 2023 I reviewed the nreal airs that's what they were called back then nreal for they Chang their name to X real and I I like these glasses you know they look like sunglasses that was the whole ethos behind the company when they had their nreal lights and nreal airs is what technology could they pack into this glasses form factor that would give them some type of augmented reality display potential uh but also be socially acceptable and it's not like I'm wearing these as sunglasses I'm not walking around the city putting these on these are media devices media consumption devices where I'm going to be wearing them at home on the couch at my desk or on a train or a plane ride but it's still important I think to get over that socially acceptable you know barrier of having something that looks almost and can pass off almost like a normal pair of glasses or in this case sunglasses I think goes a long way to making these more socially acceptable you're going to get a lot fewer weird looks and so what they were able to put in here were actually was pretty impressive two micro OLED displays made by Sony a little bigger than half an inch in diameter and through pretty conventional bird bath Optics so mirror here Optics here bouncing light back and forth into your eyeballs you get two 1080 pretty crisp and bright OLED screens allowing you to screen mirror from a tablet a phone Android phone or something like a game console like a steam deck and I actually really like using this as a display for the steam deck steam deck you know your MacBook Pros or MacBooks these days have display Port out on their USBC Port so you can plug literally this directly into the steam deck get video out because these are otherwise don't have any additional processing you know they have the displays there are speakers here and the arms but there's no battery in here there's no actual processing here everything happens on the device that you're plugging this into and the device for the most part is just going to be video out you know your iPhone 15 Pros your MacBook or iPad Pros since 2018 model allows screen mirroring my issue with the nreal airs back then was that's all it did it was fix in position this kind of narrow 46 degree diagonal fov field of view floating image in front of you while it was crisp it was big and it was ergonomically great uh the image was locked you had no tracking No 3 degree of Freedom rotational tracking definitely no six degree Freedom positional tracking it it was just like a locked in image in front of you now if you're good at keeping your head still and your body still that might work for you I'm not so the images will kind of Bounce Around not great when I'm darting my eyes and playing a video game things change so since then they release this last year I didn't really get to review it this is the beam and the beam is a dedicated processor that attempted to solve that problem it's an intermediate device as opposed to plugging the airs directly into your phone or game console you would pass it through the beam which has two USBC ports one for the glasses one for your power or your input and that would actually enable three degree of Freedom rotational Freedom rotational tracking because there actually were Gyros and are gyros in the air glasses and so the system became steam deck to beam then to the glasses and then the image would actually be fixed in some type of rotational uh 3 degree Freedom space so I could move my head and yes it would clip the edges of the field of view but at least it would be more comfortable and the beam also allowed for adjustment of how big I wanted that image to be or how far it seemed away from me really important for comfort you know the difference between having something that seems like it's 24 in big but really close or something that's 300 in big but far away they might seem like the pixels are the same size but in terms of comfort i' rather have an image seem like it's bigger but farther away and you can do that with the beam uh later on there updates allowed you to side load applications like Netflix or file browsers or do some media playback but also imperfect as a product one because even though you had two USBC ports there was no way to power your phone or your steam deck in addition to using it as a display port input and then passing it through your glasses you have to buy an additional splitter to power your device and then also power the beam Pro and then or the beam and then also power the airs it would be dongle town all over again and if you were breaking this out on an airplane really really unwieldy people did it don't get me wrong but inelegant the beam also got really hot the processing required to keep the image at low latency fixed in place and or also the decode video if you're running Netflix for example killed the battery made this really hot ergonomically just not great to have this you know on your lap or in your pocket as you were playing a game and wearing the glasses still I need device and solve what I wanted out of the original airs which was to have an image kind of fixed at least in rotational space since then they've released new glasses and another new accessory the glasses the follow-ups to the airs or the air 2s and the air2 pros slightly different micro OLED displays slightly different field of views some tradeoffs maybe a little more durable um and also the pros allowed for um builtin uh opacity electrochromatic opacity changing so there'll be a button on the aor 2 Pros where you can press them and adjusts between 0% 35% and 100% light pass through so if you wanted to watch a movie you would be completely blacked out from the outside world the air ones you have actually put on a cover if you wanted to block out the outside world so nice feature for the air2 pros uh to have that built in as something you can actually adjust on the Fly still what the dream was though you would want something that would give maybe six degrees of freedom uh control or also let you not have to use your phone to use it as a media control device and so at this past Year's augmented World Expo we had the launch of the beam Pro Beam Beam Pro different form factor very different devices this looks like it looks like a phone it's kind of basically a phone it's a kind of like an Android tablet in a phone form factor 6.5 in display uh LCD screen has even has a front-facing camera we'll talk about the cameras on the back uh entry level qualcom Snapdragon system Lun chip processor 128 gigs of storage with expandable micro SD card slot storage and Wi-Fi only on this model although some cellular connected models I think are coming out out in the future but for 200 bucks this becomes a dedicated application launcher that runs X re's nebula operating system and allows you to stream play games without having to dedicate your phone your tablet or if you don't care about the game console aspect uh and power these air glasses now because it's an Android device you can run basically whatever you want on here there's a play store you can download Netflix Disney plus Amazon Prime whatever you want Plex VLC you could sideload media on here uh and it runs their nebula OS as an application so primarily it's Android but it launches their my glasses app when you plug the airs in or the air 2s in it knows uh when you plug the glasses in and what you see is kind of a imitation fair to say ripoff of the Apple Vision Pro user interface he floating grid of circular app icons and from there you don't have ey tracking you have head tracking for rotation but you're actually using the beam Pro itself as a gyroscopic laser pointer the beam can do this as well you know it's kind of like your lgtv remote it knows where you're pointing and you have a button on the screen itself that becomes like an activation touchpad button and you can point and launcher apps what's neat though is with 6 gigs of RAM you can launch now two applications side by side you can do the same thing that beam could do move them closer move them further away but you could have a landscape large size Netflix window and then you can have like the Reddit app on the side it can use scrolling those apps are rarely filling the field of view that the the airs have so you're still moving your head left and right to get them in but I found that okay actually the the limiting field of view of the airs I didn't find as restrictive as I thought they'd be because I'm primarily looking at that one Center piece media content and I actually like being able to look down and see the beam Pros or see my phone as I was you know typing in the name of whatever movie I'm searching for or typing an email because you can anytime switch back to the Android interface and open apps normally on the phone as well the issue becomes as with the beam performance and the beam got hot it overheated constantly the beam Pro also not the best in terms of performance when you have a full 4K video running and you have YouTube TV for example and you're opening Gmail frames are going to drop uh in fact the applications aren't even optimized to take advantage of the the DRM limitations that these apps and these streaming services require to get them working so while Netflix and Disney plus works fine Prime video and uh and Hulu actually as of right now playb back isn't even allowed because it thinks that you're plugging this into a device that doesn't have DRM authentication doesn't pass through htcp uh certification and so you're just going to get this black image and XR has acknowledged this they're supposedly updating their applications to allow for the DRM uh certification but at the expense of performance and what that means is that dream of getting multiple applications here two applications running smoothly side by side still isn't quite there yet with the hardware there able to put in the beam Pro but watching a single movie watching a single window of Netflix or doing something lightweight seems to be okay right now this also has two USBC ports but unlike the beam no more display port direct input there's no way to plug in your steam deck into the beam Pro to give it that three degree of Freedom smooth rotational movement it's a conscious decision I think by them to separate this from the beam which I think they're phasing out as well well so if you want to get like a game console on here you have to go through some type of wireless streaming we have to mirror it over uh over o over steam link or you have to use Moonlight if you want to stream from your PC which adds a little bit of latency it's going to be dependent on whatever Wi-Fi network you're on it's a little bit disappointing because I thought the the original beams low latency direct display port input work pretty well despite the overheating and the battery limitations the other unique thing about the beam Pro is they put a stereo camera system on the back now this is more side by side 3D stereo photos and video so unlike something like the insta 360 uh here that I use to capture uh full 180° side by-side video vr10 style video this is more akin to what the iPhone 15 Pro can do with its cameras and uh for this what Apple calls its spatial video the cameras on the beam Pro I think are actually better than what the iPhone 15 Pro can deliver for video because it can actually do 1080 per eye at 60 frames a second the iPhone can only do 30 frames a second and I had a really great time using this going to the playground capturing video with my kids stereo video is just so powerful in terms of making it feel like the video is more alive especially at the higher frame rates the challenge is though it is a separate device and fundamentally I have no no problem with carrying an extra device especially if I'm using this as a media player you know having this in my backpack where the airs are also going to live but when you're with your family it's hard to get over the the friction of carrying two cameras you know I have my iPhone I love the camera on this and it yes it can capture 3D spatial video but it can't do spal photos and if I take photos on with the the iPhone I maybe hoping down the line that there's going to be good software and uh good uh good good models training models for AI to up convert those photos into 3D photos if I take 3D photos natively yeah I can take them with this and these 50 megapixel sensors are going to get me true side by-side 3D but I'm also it's at the expense of the higher quality in my opinion 2D photo that I can get with my iPhone or my dedicated mirrorless camera making that choice of whether to take something natively in 3D now and have the better 3D video quality now or taking the better 2D image or video now and hoping that some type of AI upconvert scaling system will give you that 3D experience in the future I think for video I want to take native 3D video for photos I'm actually happier with having 2D photos that more people can enjoy today so I'm taking a lot of 3D videos with the beam Pro more 2D photos just with uh with my iPhone now that I'm happy to try to upconvert later all this leads to is the full AR experience which is These Guys these are the xreal 2 ultas the highest end glasses they now are releasing primarily as a developer kit because these have two sensors that look like cameras on the side but they're not like the cameras on the side of these meta Ray bands they're not for taking photos these are to give these glasses real six degree of Freedom positional tracking so when you you wear this and you plug it into a beam Pro use nebula OS on your Android device you can actually physically move around and the image will stay Locked In Space the tracking is pretty good the icons the video and even the demo applications they have the tracking doesn't seem to drift and the images seem locked in place and does kind of even do some meshing of the environment your in beyond that extra level of comfort that you get from having the UI locked in space there are a bunch of trade-offs one you get another performance hit if the again no processors actually on these glosses the beam Pro is doing all the work and when you have what they call space anchor so six degree Freedom turned on frames are being dropped performance video playback is just not as smooth noticeably not as smooth an additional feature that the Ultras have is also hand tracking it's a beta feature right now but if you don't want to use the beam Pro as your gyroscopic laser pointer turn on hand tracking and it works kind of well there's no eye tracking but your pinch and tap your fingers to activate an application is ergonomically more comfortable than holding a small phone like device in your hand also gives a performance hit and a little bit of heating there is something on the side of the left temple of these glasses I could feel getting hotter when I I had six degree of Freedom tracking turned on when I had the hand tracking turn on and there isn't beyond that much else you can do um the applications are scarce right now developers are just getting this in hand and at that price point not for the vast majority of users who just want to have some comfortable media playback when they're traveling or when they're at home on the couch there are slight Optical differences they use uh between the air the air 2/ pros and the Ultras the ultas are closer to the first generation airs in terms of the size of the image the field of view and the edge sharpness and what I would say is go look at the price of the airs today first gen airs when they launched they were well over $400 they've dropped down to under 200 bucks I've seen lately and with X real kind of phasing out the beams I've seen it drop you can get a use one for under 50 bucks so if you're talking about like 250 for a first gen beam and a first gen air that you can get three degree of Freedom pass through uh on the steam deck I think that's actually a really really compelling price and that's one of the things with this company they're iterating fast I mean I wouldn't wouldn't be surprised if they're on some type of annual Hardware Cadence with their accessories with the glasses you know bu next year augmented World Expo or maybe even CES we might see another generation of the air glasses so it's one of those product lines where look to last year's product and see what you can get that at because at full native price it's still a hard sell with the quirks that they have in the hardware and the firmware and the software I do like that based on the past two years their Hardware team has been releasing firmer updates to improve performance of the devices now there's 120 hertz on the airs which wen at launch you can even do side by side 3D but you plug into a Windows PC and and you hard hold buttons for a certain amount of time so there are things that the community are requesting and the hardware team is actually delivering on it's on the software side right now for the beam Pro and the performance of the system leip processor that they chose for the beam Pro I feel like it's a little bit limiting uh for this collection of theic and there are a lot of them I'm sure there'll be more next year um my recommendation check out the first gen airs check out the beam hold off on the beam Pro until they figure out the DRM for those applications and leave the ultra for developers and and people who are hardcore enthusiasts to figure out before uh even taking a look at those these are the ones I like traveling with now the air ones um they work really well the audio sounds good and no one gives me weird looks when I wear this on the airplane because they kind of look just like Sunglasses if you have questions about extal Air air2 air2 Pro Air 2 ultas Beam Beam Pro I know it's a lot of products kind of gets confusing post them in the comments below I'm be happy to answer them thanks so much for watching and we'll see you next time thank you guys so much for watching that video I would be remiss if I didn't tell you we have some excellent merch we have a five pack of demerit badges for sale right now at tested store.com we've got the I hung it off of level demerit badge the I built the chair backwards demerit badge the I hit my thumb with a hammer Dem merit badge we've got the stapler in my finger Dem merit badge and my favorite I the duct tape to itself Dem merit badge get yours now tested SL store. store Dash store tested Dash store tested it's right here there just click therehey everybody it's Norman from tested and today we're going to talk about this wide range of products I got in front of me this is the X real lineup of their smart glasses their what they can finally proudly say augmented reality glasses if you might recall over a year ago beginning of 2023 I reviewed the nreal airs that's what they were called back then nreal for they Chang their name to X real and I I like these glasses you know they look like sunglasses that was the whole ethos behind the company when they had their nreal lights and nreal airs is what technology could they pack into this glasses form factor that would give them some type of augmented reality display potential uh but also be socially acceptable and it's not like I'm wearing these as sunglasses I'm not walking around the city putting these on these are media devices media consumption devices where I'm going to be wearing them at home on the couch at my desk or on a train or a plane ride but it's still important I think to get over that socially acceptable you know barrier of having something that looks almost and can pass off almost like a normal pair of glasses or in this case sunglasses I think goes a long way to making these more socially acceptable you're going to get a lot fewer weird looks and so what they were able to put in here were actually was pretty impressive two micro OLED displays made by Sony a little bigger than half an inch in diameter and through pretty conventional bird bath Optics so mirror here Optics here bouncing light back and forth into your eyeballs you get two 1080 pretty crisp and bright OLED screens allowing you to screen mirror from a tablet a phone Android phone or something like a game console like a steam deck and I actually really like using this as a display for the steam deck steam deck you know your MacBook Pros or MacBooks these days have display Port out on their USBC Port so you can plug literally this directly into the steam deck get video out because these are otherwise don't have any additional processing you know they have the displays there are speakers here and the arms but there's no battery in here there's no actual processing here everything happens on the device that you're plugging this into and the device for the most part is just going to be video out you know your iPhone 15 Pros your MacBook or iPad Pros since 2018 model allows screen mirroring my issue with the nreal airs back then was that's all it did it was fix in position this kind of narrow 46 degree diagonal fov field of view floating image in front of you while it was crisp it was big and it was ergonomically great uh the image was locked you had no tracking No 3 degree of Freedom rotational tracking definitely no six degree Freedom positional tracking it it was just like a locked in image in front of you now if you're good at keeping your head still and your body still that might work for you I'm not so the images will kind of Bounce Around not great when I'm darting my eyes and playing a video game things change so since then they release this last year I didn't really get to review it this is the beam and the beam is a dedicated processor that attempted to solve that problem it's an intermediate device as opposed to plugging the airs directly into your phone or game console you would pass it through the beam which has two USBC ports one for the glasses one for your power or your input and that would actually enable three degree of Freedom rotational Freedom rotational tracking because there actually were Gyros and are gyros in the air glasses and so the system became steam deck to beam then to the glasses and then the image would actually be fixed in some type of rotational uh 3 degree Freedom space so I could move my head and yes it would clip the edges of the field of view but at least it would be more comfortable and the beam also allowed for adjustment of how big I wanted that image to be or how far it seemed away from me really important for comfort you know the difference between having something that seems like it's 24 in big but really close or something that's 300 in big but far away they might seem like the pixels are the same size but in terms of comfort i' rather have an image seem like it's bigger but farther away and you can do that with the beam uh later on there updates allowed you to side load applications like Netflix or file browsers or do some media playback but also imperfect as a product one because even though you had two USBC ports there was no way to power your phone or your steam deck in addition to using it as a display port input and then passing it through your glasses you have to buy an additional splitter to power your device and then also power the beam Pro and then or the beam and then also power the airs it would be dongle town all over again and if you were breaking this out on an airplane really really unwieldy people did it don't get me wrong but inelegant the beam also got really hot the processing required to keep the image at low latency fixed in place and or also the decode video if you're running Netflix for example killed the battery made this really hot ergonomically just not great to have this you know on your lap or in your pocket as you were playing a game and wearing the glasses still I need device and solve what I wanted out of the original airs which was to have an image kind of fixed at least in rotational space since then they've released new glasses and another new accessory the glasses the follow-ups to the airs or the air 2s and the air2 pros slightly different micro OLED displays slightly different field of views some tradeoffs maybe a little more durable um and also the pros allowed for um builtin uh opacity electrochromatic opacity changing so there'll be a button on the aor 2 Pros where you can press them and adjusts between 0% 35% and 100% light pass through so if you wanted to watch a movie you would be completely blacked out from the outside world the air ones you have actually put on a cover if you wanted to block out the outside world so nice feature for the air2 pros uh to have that built in as something you can actually adjust on the Fly still what the dream was though you would want something that would give maybe six degrees of freedom uh control or also let you not have to use your phone to use it as a media control device and so at this past Year's augmented World Expo we had the launch of the beam Pro Beam Beam Pro different form factor very different devices this looks like it looks like a phone it's kind of basically a phone it's a kind of like an Android tablet in a phone form factor 6.5 in display uh LCD screen has even has a front-facing camera we'll talk about the cameras on the back uh entry level qualcom Snapdragon system Lun chip processor 128 gigs of storage with expandable micro SD card slot storage and Wi-Fi only on this model although some cellular connected models I think are coming out out in the future but for 200 bucks this becomes a dedicated application launcher that runs X re's nebula operating system and allows you to stream play games without having to dedicate your phone your tablet or if you don't care about the game console aspect uh and power these air glasses now because it's an Android device you can run basically whatever you want on here there's a play store you can download Netflix Disney plus Amazon Prime whatever you want Plex VLC you could sideload media on here uh and it runs their nebula OS as an application so primarily it's Android but it launches their my glasses app when you plug the airs in or the air 2s in it knows uh when you plug the glasses in and what you see is kind of a imitation fair to say ripoff of the Apple Vision Pro user interface he floating grid of circular app icons and from there you don't have ey tracking you have head tracking for rotation but you're actually using the beam Pro itself as a gyroscopic laser pointer the beam can do this as well you know it's kind of like your lgtv remote it knows where you're pointing and you have a button on the screen itself that becomes like an activation touchpad button and you can point and launcher apps what's neat though is with 6 gigs of RAM you can launch now two applications side by side you can do the same thing that beam could do move them closer move them further away but you could have a landscape large size Netflix window and then you can have like the Reddit app on the side it can use scrolling those apps are rarely filling the field of view that the the airs have so you're still moving your head left and right to get them in but I found that okay actually the the limiting field of view of the airs I didn't find as restrictive as I thought they'd be because I'm primarily looking at that one Center piece media content and I actually like being able to look down and see the beam Pros or see my phone as I was you know typing in the name of whatever movie I'm searching for or typing an email because you can anytime switch back to the Android interface and open apps normally on the phone as well the issue becomes as with the beam performance and the beam got hot it overheated constantly the beam Pro also not the best in terms of performance when you have a full 4K video running and you have YouTube TV for example and you're opening Gmail frames are going to drop uh in fact the applications aren't even optimized to take advantage of the the DRM limitations that these apps and these streaming services require to get them working so while Netflix and Disney plus works fine Prime video and uh and Hulu actually as of right now playb back isn't even allowed because it thinks that you're plugging this into a device that doesn't have DRM authentication doesn't pass through htcp uh certification and so you're just going to get this black image and XR has acknowledged this they're supposedly updating their applications to allow for the DRM uh certification but at the expense of performance and what that means is that dream of getting multiple applications here two applications running smoothly side by side still isn't quite there yet with the hardware there able to put in the beam Pro but watching a single movie watching a single window of Netflix or doing something lightweight seems to be okay right now this also has two USBC ports but unlike the beam no more display port direct input there's no way to plug in your steam deck into the beam Pro to give it that three degree of Freedom smooth rotational movement it's a conscious decision I think by them to separate this from the beam which I think they're phasing out as well well so if you want to get like a game console on here you have to go through some type of wireless streaming we have to mirror it over uh over o over steam link or you have to use Moonlight if you want to stream from your PC which adds a little bit of latency it's going to be dependent on whatever Wi-Fi network you're on it's a little bit disappointing because I thought the the original beams low latency direct display port input work pretty well despite the overheating and the battery limitations the other unique thing about the beam Pro is they put a stereo camera system on the back now this is more side by side 3D stereo photos and video so unlike something like the insta 360 uh here that I use to capture uh full 180° side by-side video vr10 style video this is more akin to what the iPhone 15 Pro can do with its cameras and uh for this what Apple calls its spatial video the cameras on the beam Pro I think are actually better than what the iPhone 15 Pro can deliver for video because it can actually do 1080 per eye at 60 frames a second the iPhone can only do 30 frames a second and I had a really great time using this going to the playground capturing video with my kids stereo video is just so powerful in terms of making it feel like the video is more alive especially at the higher frame rates the challenge is though it is a separate device and fundamentally I have no no problem with carrying an extra device especially if I'm using this as a media player you know having this in my backpack where the airs are also going to live but when you're with your family it's hard to get over the the friction of carrying two cameras you know I have my iPhone I love the camera on this and it yes it can capture 3D spatial video but it can't do spal photos and if I take photos on with the the iPhone I maybe hoping down the line that there's going to be good software and uh good uh good good models training models for AI to up convert those photos into 3D photos if I take 3D photos natively yeah I can take them with this and these 50 megapixel sensors are going to get me true side by-side 3D but I'm also it's at the expense of the higher quality in my opinion 2D photo that I can get with my iPhone or my dedicated mirrorless camera making that choice of whether to take something natively in 3D now and have the better 3D video quality now or taking the better 2D image or video now and hoping that some type of AI upconvert scaling system will give you that 3D experience in the future I think for video I want to take native 3D video for photos I'm actually happier with having 2D photos that more people can enjoy today so I'm taking a lot of 3D videos with the beam Pro more 2D photos just with uh with my iPhone now that I'm happy to try to upconvert later all this leads to is the full AR experience which is These Guys these are the xreal 2 ultas the highest end glasses they now are releasing primarily as a developer kit because these have two sensors that look like cameras on the side but they're not like the cameras on the side of these meta Ray bands they're not for taking photos these are to give these glasses real six degree of Freedom positional tracking so when you you wear this and you plug it into a beam Pro use nebula OS on your Android device you can actually physically move around and the image will stay Locked In Space the tracking is pretty good the icons the video and even the demo applications they have the tracking doesn't seem to drift and the images seem locked in place and does kind of even do some meshing of the environment your in beyond that extra level of comfort that you get from having the UI locked in space there are a bunch of trade-offs one you get another performance hit if the again no processors actually on these glosses the beam Pro is doing all the work and when you have what they call space anchor so six degree Freedom turned on frames are being dropped performance video playback is just not as smooth noticeably not as smooth an additional feature that the Ultras have is also hand tracking it's a beta feature right now but if you don't want to use the beam Pro as your gyroscopic laser pointer turn on hand tracking and it works kind of well there's no eye tracking but your pinch and tap your fingers to activate an application is ergonomically more comfortable than holding a small phone like device in your hand also gives a performance hit and a little bit of heating there is something on the side of the left temple of these glasses I could feel getting hotter when I I had six degree of Freedom tracking turned on when I had the hand tracking turn on and there isn't beyond that much else you can do um the applications are scarce right now developers are just getting this in hand and at that price point not for the vast majority of users who just want to have some comfortable media playback when they're traveling or when they're at home on the couch there are slight Optical differences they use uh between the air the air 2/ pros and the Ultras the ultas are closer to the first generation airs in terms of the size of the image the field of view and the edge sharpness and what I would say is go look at the price of the airs today first gen airs when they launched they were well over $400 they've dropped down to under 200 bucks I've seen lately and with X real kind of phasing out the beams I've seen it drop you can get a use one for under 50 bucks so if you're talking about like 250 for a first gen beam and a first gen air that you can get three degree of Freedom pass through uh on the steam deck I think that's actually a really really compelling price and that's one of the things with this company they're iterating fast I mean I wouldn't wouldn't be surprised if they're on some type of annual Hardware Cadence with their accessories with the glasses you know bu next year augmented World Expo or maybe even CES we might see another generation of the air glasses so it's one of those product lines where look to last year's product and see what you can get that at because at full native price it's still a hard sell with the quirks that they have in the hardware and the firmware and the software I do like that based on the past two years their Hardware team has been releasing firmer updates to improve performance of the devices now there's 120 hertz on the airs which wen at launch you can even do side by side 3D but you plug into a Windows PC and and you hard hold buttons for a certain amount of time so there are things that the community are requesting and the hardware team is actually delivering on it's on the software side right now for the beam Pro and the performance of the system leip processor that they chose for the beam Pro I feel like it's a little bit limiting uh for this collection of theic and there are a lot of them I'm sure there'll be more next year um my recommendation check out the first gen airs check out the beam hold off on the beam Pro until they figure out the DRM for those applications and leave the ultra for developers and and people who are hardcore enthusiasts to figure out before uh even taking a look at those these are the ones I like traveling with now the air ones um they work really well the audio sounds good and no one gives me weird looks when I wear this on the airplane because they kind of look just like Sunglasses if you have questions about extal Air air2 air2 Pro Air 2 ultas Beam Beam Pro I know it's a lot of products kind of gets confusing post them in the comments below I'm be happy to answer them thanks so much for watching and we'll see you next time thank you guys so much for watching that video I would be remiss if I didn't tell you we have some excellent merch we have a five pack of demerit badges for sale right now at tested store.com we've got the I hung it off of level demerit badge the I built the chair backwards demerit badge the I hit my thumb with a hammer Dem merit badge we've got the stapler in my finger Dem merit badge and my favorite I the duct tape to itself Dem merit badge get yours now tested SL store. store Dash store tested Dash store tested it's right here there just click there\n"