I've tried a few augmented reality headsets in this job and
these are probably the closest to a practical consumer product I've seen.
When I first tried these Nreal Light glasses almost two years ago
at the CES tech show I was quite impressed.
They're light enough to throw in your bag and they do give you
these bright, crisp visuals overlaid on the real world.
Now they've finally gone on sale in the USA and I would say
they're probably still a stepping-stone product to full AR glasses.
And here's why.
The glasses have to be tethered to your Android smartphone
to provide the visuals and also the battery power
and that means you don't have to charge your glasses which is great
but it will drain your phone's battery a bit quicker.
It has built-in speakers and microphones and cameras
in the front to track the room,
so that the visuals all stay in the right place where they're supposed to.
You have full freedom to get up and walk around and look at things
and the perspective changes as you move.
It is really quite cool.
The visuals come from two high-definition OLED panels
in the glasses that are beamed into your eyes by the lenses
and the visuals really do look bright and sharp.
It's like a projector is shining images on the walls around you.
The visuals don't fill your entire field of vision.
Turn your head and things start to disappear.
Nreal says the glasses have a 52 degree field of view.
In practice, it means whatever you're looking directly towards
is visible and things start to tail off in your peripheral vision.
They managed to squeeze all of this
into a fairly ordinary looking pair of sunglasses
although whether you think these look fashionable is probably subjective.
I have had a few people say these look like Dad sunglasses
and also the meme sunglasses.
They also sit quite high up on your nose and quite proud of your face
and they have to because otherwise this black bar
at the top which is not transparent would block your field of view.
They are also not the lightest at 112g which is a lot more
than a regular pair of glasses. Wearing that for long times
you start to feel they are a bit heavier than glasses.
Nreal has developed an app called Nebula which acts
as your home screen and you use your tethered phone
as a remote to point at what you want and tap the screen to click.
You can launch mixed-reality apps or pin web-browser windows around your room.
I tried this in the kitchen by pinning a virtual recipe
to the wall and then I can look at my cooking
and just turned my head and looked at the wall to see my recipe.
I suppose it was a little bit more convenient than having to check my phone
and unlock my phone when I've got raw ingredients on my hands.
But the trade-off is that you have to wear augmented reality glasses
while you're cooking.
You can also pin a huge virtual display on the wall
so it looks like you're watching TV or a film on a huge cinema screen.
Although I already have quite a big TV in my living room
and if I'm somewhere else like in a hotel or on the train
I can usually get by just fine watching TV on my phone.
There are obviously some games to play.
One is this ghost-shooting game where the ghosts are overlaid
on your real living room and another app turns your desk
into a tower-defence game.
So you can walk around and see in 3D.
Definitely cool to try and I think anyone that has a go on this would say:
ah, that was very impressive as a tech demo.
I don't know how often you would go back to these games.
The graphics are sort of smartphone quality.
They're like mini games you might play to kill a few minutes
on the Tube whereas I'm more likely to stay immersed in a story game
that's hours long if I play on my console.
With console games I can also control all the action just
by moving my thumbs a little bit.
I don't have to get up off the sofa and walk around my dining room table.
Perhaps with virtual reality there's more of an argument
for that because you're fully immersed and transported away to a faraway world.
But with AR I'm projecting items
on to my dining room table and I sort of think what's the point?
I've seen plenty of my dining room table for the last two years.
For me the real potential in this lies in productivity.
Imagine being able to go to a coffee shop,
putting these on and seeing three huge virtual monitors.
So you could do some video editing
without needing to bring a display with you.
The closest I got was plugging this into my laptop
and the glasses then act as a second monitor,
so I can look down at my laptop to see my timeline and look up
into the display and see the footage I was editing on a huge screen.
Even though you can move around the room wearing these
they still feel like quite a stationary experience to me.
I don't think you would want to wear these on your commute or
while you're out shopping. They are not the kind of glasses
where you are going to see notifications flying in or see real-world maps
and directions superimposed on the street in front of you.
It's not that kind of augmented reality experience.
Although it has an idea of what we might get in the future.
For that to happen I'd expect these glasses to get lighter
and obscure less of your field of view.
You'd need to get rid of this tether
and you don't want to use the phone as a control,
you want some hand recognition which Nreal is working on.
Once some big companies like Apple
or Facebook enter the space and throw some of their big apps
on to the platform you can really see the potential.
But as an early entry into the space it gives you a flavour
of what the technology can do.