There have been some fairly substantial changes over at Nreal, that will change the Nreal Air experience forever – and it all starts with a rebranding of the company. Nreal is no more – the company is now called Xreal.
The name is designed to reflect that the company is working on expanded reality experiences and it makes perfect sense – but it means that the Nreal Air are now known as the Xreal Air. We’ll refer to the company as Xreal hereafter to reflect its change in branding.
But what this news is really all about is the launch of the Xreal Beam. This is an adapter for the Xreal Air (remember that’s what the Nreal Air is now known as) that will allow you to have a wired or wireless connection to games consoles, PCs and more, so you can get the Air’s “spatial display” and play games or watch on a 201-inch display.
To explain this, we need to back up a bit. The Xreal Air connects to your smartphone via cable allowing screen mirroring at a basic level, but also enabling more options via the Nebula app. Importantly, the Nebula app supports 3DoF – three degrees of freedom – which allows the virtual display to remain fixed in place. This is the part that means you can move your head to look around the virtual space, without the screen moving with you. Xreal calls this “spatial display” and in the past it’s only been available via the Nebula app on Android.
The Xreal Beam adapter looks like an iPod Classic, and allows that spatial display technology to be used with other devices. This means you can have that 201-inch display fixed in place while playing on the PS5 for example and allowing you to look around the space, or look away, without the screen moving with you. This completely changes the experience of having a virtual display.
It will support wired and wireless connections to source devices and handle the video processing to enable spatial display, so we imagine that’s talking to the Air AR glasses to remove head motion to keep the image static in your view.
Xreal
There’s a built-in 4870mAh battery supporting up to 3 hours of use and there are two USB-C ports on it so you can play and have power at the same time, so it’s not just battery powered. The box will also support DTS:X Ultra so you can have spatial audio along with your spatial display. There’s also a firmware update coming in Q3 2023 to move the Xreal Air glasses to 90Hz refresh rate.
The launch of Xreal Beam is part of a larger plan to widen the support of the Xreal Air glasses. While it launched as an Android-only experience in essence, the focus moving forward is on gaming and PC users. Nebula has been in beta on Mac and a beta for Nebula on Windows will also launch soon, while Nebula for SteamOS will allow you to directly connect your Xreal Air to your Steam Deck.
When we first reviewed the Xreal Air AR glasses in 2022, we commented on the limited device support and the launch of Xreal Beam – and wider Nebula apps – expands the potential for the Air to be more useful. Xreal has said that while the focus of the next stage is on gaming, there will be more advancements in the future to allow the watching of DRM content too, which should make the Xreal Air glasses seem like a much more valuable proposition.
There’s no price on the Xreal Beam right now, but pre-orders will open on 1 June 2023. The Xreal Air are available to buy today.
