Xreal is having a big CES. It announced its new 1S AR glasses and the Switch 2-ready Neo dock that’s also a battery — both of which are already available to buy. It’s not done with the announcements yet, as it delivered a peek at an upcoming partnership with Asus that will yield a new set of ROG AR glasses made specifically for gamers.
In the one and only image that was shared with The Verge, the ROG Xreal R1 gaming glasses look like cyberpunk aviators. There’s an LED strip on the stem to indicate… something. Perhaps battery life, or something previously unquantifiable, like leetness. Either way, the stems seem quite a bit thicker than those on the 1S, and whatever tech the companies are cramming inside may be necessary to allow for their marquee feature: a 240Hz refresh rate. These are apparently the first to double the normal 120Hz refresh rate that’s common in AR glasses today.
These glasses have micro-OLED panels running at 1080p resolution, and they’ll attach to gadgets with a USB-C cable. Included with this set of glasses is the ROG Control Dock that features two HDMI 2.0 ports and one DisplayPort 1.4 port, making it useful for both PC and console gamers (Xreal’s Neo only has USB-C, while Viture’s competing Pro Mobile Dock has HDMI and USB-C, but not DisplayPort). This Asus dock will let you toggle between video sources with a single button.
Xreal boasts a 57-degree field of view for this model, which is on the high end of what you can get in most AR glasses right now (it matches what the company’s $649 One Pro offer). It claims that they can cover 95 percent of the viewable space with a massive 171-inch screen placed at the virtual equivalent of 4 meters in front of you. Like other recent Xreal models, the ROG Xreal R1 have three degrees of freedom, allowing you to anchor the screen in place virtually or let it follow your head’s movements.
The ROG Xreal R1 will launch in the first half of this year. The company hasn’t yet shared a price.