About six months ago, I bought a pair of the Xreal Air 2 Pro “wearable display” glasses.

I wrote up my initial thoughts at the time.

Six months on, here’s where I’m at with them:

• I wish that they were 4K, as I’d like to have more on the screen than the current resolution permits. Obviously, I knew this when I bought them, but I hadn’t appreciated how limiting I’d find that lower resolution. That, for me, is the biggest let down: there are limited reasons why I’d want to use them over just using my laptop’s screen:

  • When I need an extended screen (particularly using the Beam accessory, to “fix” the extended screen in place, to the right of my laptop’s screen.)
  • When I need privacy to work on something so that it doesn’t show on my laptop screen. This is rare, but not never. On a train, it works well.

• But there are reasons to use them and, when I use them, I enjoy using them. There’s something quite futuristic about them.

• I really do like the fact that they are powered by USB-C, and don’t require a login or a cloud connection/subscription.

• The glasses are comfortable, and light enough not to be a nuisance, but they rest just a fraction too high on my nose. If they were just a bit lower, I’d see the bottom of the screen more comfortably.

• I haven’t been able to change the nose piece / bridge. I’d like to try the larger one, which comes in the box with the glasses, but I obviously haven’t worked out the knack of removing the current nose piece, and I’m afraid of damaging it. A fellow fedizen showed me how they removed the nose piece from theirs, an that gave me the confidence to try pulling a bit harder. And it worked. So now I will see how it is with the larger nose piece in place.

• The left arm definitely gets warm after only a few minutes of use. Not uncomfortably warm, but noticeably warm.

• The Beam accessory is useful, but limited. It feels - and, I believe, is - like a clumsy first release.

  • I’ve got Jellyfin running on it, and VLC, in case I want to watch something using the glasses.
  • It can be navigated quite easily without looking at it, once one gets the hang of the controls. (So why do I think of it as clumsy…? Not sure. But I do.) *It has an active fan in it, and it is too noisy.