Google Taps Xreal for ‘Optical See-Through’ Smart Glasses That Could Beat Meta’s Orion AR Glasses

We told you Google would be gunning for Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses with its Android XR “spatial computing” platform that was announced last year. At its I/O developer conference today, the tech giant said it’s teaming up with Xreal for a pair of next-gen augmented reality smart glasses called Project Aura.

Details are light right now, and Xreal told Gizmodo it won’t be demoing Project Aura at the show, but we do know a few things that should get your gears turning on where things are headed. According to Xreal, Project Aura is an “optical-see-through (OST) device” that’s “lightweight and tethered, cinematic, and Gemini-AI-powered.” It has a “large field-of-view experience.” How wide? Xreal hasn’t said. The company’s current top-of-the-line One Pro smart glasses have a 57-degree FOV. Each new iteration has brought a wider viewing experience—the One have a 50-degree FOV and the Air 2 Pro have a 46-degree FOV. A wider FOV means looking at the built-in virtual displays feels less like peering through a floating window or binoculars where the clearest part is only in the center.

The one image we have to go off shows a design not too dissimilar to the One Pro, but with three cameras—two on each side and one in the nose bridge. There’s also a tiny red button on the right ear. Xreal says Project Aura is tethered—they’ll likely connect to phones, tablets, and laptops just like the company’s current smart glasses.

We also know that the smart glasses will be powered by a Qualcomm chip of some kind. This is an interesting nugget because Xreal had previously boasted about the X1 chip, the company’s first custom-designed chipset, for the One and One Pro. With the X1 chip, Xreal told me last year that it could build more compact and power-efficient smart glasses compared to the competition. Using a Qualcomm chip, Google seems to be recycling the same Android and Wear OS wearables playbook, by letting many different companies design smart glasses running on Android XR while leaving the chipset design to its longtime chip partner.

From the sound of things, the “optical-see-through” nature of Project Aura suggests the smart glasses will offer an experience that is more akin to what you’d expect from a pair of AR frames. App windows might float in front of your vision and stay “locked” in place even while you move your head or body. Or perhaps the windows just follow you wherever you go. Without more information, it’s hard to know what using Project Aura is like. But my gut tells me it’s something similar to Meta’s Orion concept AR glasses, which blew me away when I demoed them last year. The reality check with Orion is that they’re nowhere near ready for consumer release—each prototype pair reportedly costs around $10,000 to make—and Meta is allegedly planning to downgrade many of its capabilities, such as its silicon carbide waveguide lenses, in order to get the price down significantly.

We won’t have long to wait to learn more about Project Aura. Xreal says it plans to share more next month at Augmented World Expo, as well as later in the year. Who knows, if you’re reading this on your phone, maybe in the not-too-distant future you’ll be reading Gizmodo articles through smart glasses instead. Though, what’s more likely is you’ll still need to plug a pair into your phone.