At $1,279, Google’s Xreal Aura will go head-to-head with Meta’s VR Glasses

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The first transparent Android XR glasses are “weeks” away — if you made a reservation.

The first transparent Android XR glasses are “weeks” away — if you made a reservation.

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Two weeks ago, journalists in the San Francisco Bay Area got to try two hot new wearables that weigh only around 100 grams: the just-revealed Meta VR Glasses, and the long-awaited transparent Google XR glasses built in partnership with Xreal. It turns out they’re going head-to-head. Xreal has just opened Aura pre-orders starting at $1,279, $20 less than the Meta VR Glasses.

That’s for the Xreal Aura with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage; there’ll also be a 16GB / 512GB config for $1,499. (Xreal couldn’t tell us whether the 16GB of RAM would be important for some apps by publish time.)

Both the Google / Xreal Aura and Meta’s VR Glasses let you overlay virtual objects and desktops on the real world. Both are relatively lightweight because they’ve got a cord — their Qualcomm Snapdragon Reality Elite chips and batteries both live in a compute puck, which runs either Meta’s Horizon OS or Android XR. Both greet you with a grid of floating app icons to choose from.

But they’re very different experiences in practice, primarily because the Google / Xreal Aura has transparent lenses, while the Meta VR Glasses use passthrough vision to let you see the real world and offers more immersion. While the Xreal Aura has one of the largest transparent fields of view yet at 70 degrees diagonal, it’s still smaller than Meta’s passthrough glasses. I wrote all about it in this story, and it’s just one of many differences.