AR glasses still suck at AR, but they’re solid secondary screens

Two years ago, at CES 2023, I looked into my augmented reality crystal ball and predicted It wasn’t long before we talked about “glassiness” again. CES 2025 It was full of AR goggles and you couldn’t walk five feet without finding another booth asking you to slip a pair over your eyes. Glasses screens look better than ever. The controls feel tighter. Still, they’re not there yet, not by miles. The best glasses we used were just screen replacements.

Companies like Chamelo have released smart glasses with color-changing lenses. Apart from these, there were also sets of glasses that functioned as wearable cameras. Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses has become increasingly popular in the last two years. These were not all small companies. Next to it new handheld devicesLenovo has debuted the redesigned $400 Legion Glasses 2. They are an update of the company’s analog glasses. Glasses that close from 2023 with better screen clarity and brightness. You have to fit them properly on your face, but they offer great-looking micro-OLED displays and loud, clear sound.

Although these glasses are designed for handheld devices, they are still helpful for the mobile gaming experience. Similarly, AR glasses maker XReal has released the $500 XReal One and the $600 XReal One Pro. These glasses connect to your phone or computer to create a second screen. They include a link to pin the image in place or track your head wherever you look. Even better, they offer ultra widescreen viewing when connected to a PC so you can get Apple Vision Pro ultra wide Mac mirror experience at a fraction of the price. They were our favorite glasses at the convention, and they earned our place the best of the show list.

CES 2025’s Functional AR Glasses Filled with Glowing Green Text

As our readers like to point out, XReal’s latest doesn’t fit the “augmented reality” or even “augmented reality” mold. It’s a hard thing to hear, but any real XR curved glasses were all just prototypes. In the two years since I wrote my original AR CES article, these glasses are still trying to solve the same problems.

Take TCL’s RayNeo brand. The company slid the RayNeo X3 Pro around my eye and tried to translate the text from Mandarin to English. At least it worked most of the time. With too much noise around us, the glasses struggled to interpret correctly or hear our commands. Even then, the translation was slow and difficult, and it certainly didn’t look or feel like a fully finished product. The glasses have touch controls on the right arm, which mostly work. As with the other glasses, they require you to place them precisely on your nose to see a wall of green, beta text describing the AI-connected software. These were all similar problems I encountered with the company’s prototype glasses two years ago.

At least the RayNeo glasses used Waveguide displays instead of projection like the XReal glasses. The company also mentioned that its glasses have two sensors for image recognition and hand tracking, but I wasn’t able to demonstrate either of those capabilities. Goggles brand Rokid also had a pair of glasses that displayed app listings that you could view on the glasses with some manual controls, but you’d still only see green text in your AR environment.

This was a common problem I had with other brands of products. I popped on the LAWK One sunglasses with the shades wrapped around my tanks and instantly felt like a bum who owned a bunch of jet skis and wanted everyone to know about it. The glasses are designed for sports users who want to start racing timers in AR. Can it start the timer? Yes, but then you have ugly green text blocking your field of view. LAWK also claims that the new View glasses can stream live on TikTok, but I wasn’t able to test any of that functionality. These are more like Meta Ray-Ban style glasses without the screen.

So far, no one has solved all the problems with AR glasses

Based on my experiences, even though I wore similar designs at CES two years ago, any real “augmented reality” glasses didn’t feel like a complete product. Like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, I find it hard to trust AI models for all but the most basic of queries, and without on-device processing, they’ll still rely on external devices for everything you want to use them for.

Meta is one of the few companies showing us the possibilities of true AR glasses, although we don’t yet know when or if they will become a product you can buy. The company’s Orion project uses a pair of AR glasses, a wristband for motion control, and a processing disk that fits in your pocket. Rumors suggest that Samsung may launch it your own smart glasses this year with more AI vision functionality, though based on these hints, it certainly can’t be a phone replacement, at least not yet.

I’m obsessed with AR glasses. They have a lot more appeal than big and heavy VR headsets. It was XReal’s signature AR glasses from last year $700 Air 2 Ultrawhich also has some hand tracking and AR capabilities. When I tested with the prototype UI last year, they were limited. It’s hard to develop an unbound UI. The Spacetop G1 laptop It uses the same XReal glasses from 2024 instead of a traditional screen, but it runs on an Android-based OS without the full functionality of a Windows PC or Mac. They’re a haven for developers, but not the kind of device any Joe Schmo would reach for first.

We’re still in the prototype stage for AR, but companies think there’s a market for these devices right now. No one but developers and self-proclaimed futurists will find most of these AR glasses useful in everyday life. But if you’re on a cheap red-eye flight without a rear-mounted TV, these lightweight, tethered, secondary-screen glasses can be a good way to watch a movie without a big laptop or, worse, a big Apple. Vision Pro headset.