1920 x 1080, 120Hz

My desktop and laptop monitors have a higher resolution and refresh rate and don’t require me to have glasses on my face.

But I do like the idea of being able to haul goggles around for use with a laptop, and I tried it with a Royole Moon (unlike VR goggles that spend some of the resolution on peripheral vision to give you an immersive view oriented at games, this sticks the pixels where you’d view a screen) a while back. I didn’t think it was worthwhile compared to a laptop screen. Here was my take:

• Tend to fog up. Probably not an issue for XREAL glasses; the Moon has stuff to try to block out surrounding light.

• Annoying to not be able to see what one is doing occasionally without lifting glasses. Probably not as much of an issue; IIRC, the XREAL glasses are not fully-opaque in display and the highest-end XREAL glasses have a button that flips between three levels of opacity.

• Pressure on nose began to get annoying after longer sessions. Probably could do better with better design, lighter weight; I could believe that XREAL glasses do better.

• Unless glasses are situated just right for any given eye, slightly blurry. This was obnoxious, and I expect a fundamental issue for any HMD, absent the introduction of some kind of motorized mount for the screens to detect and slightly auto-adjust screen distance from eye. Edges also slightly blurry, probably require some kind of fancier optics to solve; users also report this on the XREAL glasses. The Moon was really aimed at movie viewing, for which a bit of blurriness is ignorable, but for reading text, it’s annoying. You may have also experienced this if you’ve used a projector as display; for movie viewing, it doesn’t really need to be in perfect focus, but it’s much-more-noticeable when dealing with text.

• One more thing to carry with laptop and set up beyond just flipping open a lid, which is somewhat annoying.

• One more battery-powered device to charge, though one could feed off the laptop’s battery. Could also carry a power station.

• One more cable floating around.

• The Moon was intended to do movie playback rather than just act as a monitor, so took a few operations to get it into “monitor mode”. I can believe that other HMDs could work better.

• The Moon had its own boot time independent of the computer to which it was attached. I can believe that other HMDs could work better.

• Connection that didn’t like talking to my laptop’s external HDMI display ports and would sometimes lose connection. I can believe that other HMDs would work better.

• Some screen area not at optimal viewing arc. For me, the visual arc for the Moon was slightly too large and the edges were hard to see. I can believe that a different HMD might do better. I was able to use xrandr to just not use some of the screen space on Linux, create a smaller, virtual screen; I’d imagine that one could probably use a similar fix with another HMD with a viewing arc that is too large…

• Native resolution on HMDs not as high as that on laptop displays. Not the end of the world, but it’s rare for me to downgrade in resolution.

Some of those are not fundamental to HMDs, but they are things that I would consider on a new HMD, given my past experience.

The integrated headphones on the Moon were pretty good in passive isolation, though they didn’t support ANC. The XREAL glasses have built-in speakers and no cup over the ears to provide isolation. I don’t know how it feels to wear XREAL glasses with another set of headphones, but my guess is that you can’t get the same level of seal and thus sound isolation that circumaural, closed-back headphones can provide, so keep in mind that if you’re wearing an HMD, you may be somewhat committed to their integrated sound system unless you’re going to commit to earbuds (which for me are uncomfortable for long sessions). Also, when I do use earbuds, I prefer to use “sport” earbuds that have a hook around the ear to keep them secure, and if one were wearing XREAL glasses, that will collide with the glasses trying to do the same.

For these XREAL glasses, which I’ve looked at before, I believe at least one mode involves tracking head movement and creating a “virtual screen” that hovers in space to avoid having the screen move with your head. That sort of thing is necessary for AR functionality; the Moon doesn’t do that, since it doesn’t do AR. I don’t know whether this “floating screen” buys a user much if you’re not using the glasses as an AR device, just as a plain old display, but I would point out that if used in that mode, you’re going to spend some resolution on displaying a rendered image of a screen rather than a screen.

I liked the idea. I did not find the reality to be where I’d hoped for; they did not replace my laptop or desktop screen.

I can believe that there are specific limited use cases for which HMDs in their present state could legitimately replace a laptop screen, like where someone has to use a laptop in a public environment, like on an airplane, and is concerned about their seatmate being able to view their screen.

I tried gaming and watching movies with some early 2000s version of AR glasses (basically just a see trough monitor on your head).

Resolution and input delay was horrible but it was fun for a bit.

I tried a pair of the Xreal Ones recently. They were pretty decent, though I was a little disappointed by the limited FOV (relative to real life screens, as I gather they’re pretty good for this style of display) the screen pinning was very good, and I really liked the “ultrawide” support (other than the aforementioned fov).

I’m thinking about buying a pair before I have a bunch of long flights later in the year.

I’ve been considering a pair of X-reals out of curiosity but they are right at the tipping point for tech I may not use enough to justify the purchase. Even the price drop in the article still isn’t quite enough.