Source: Nreal Air initial review: Going virtual with the AR glasses
(Pocket-lint) – EE is bringing the Nreal Air to the UK as its exclusive retailer, so you can step into virtual worlds with the new glasses and your phone.
We spent some time with the new AR glasses ahead of the UK launch.
The Nreal Air is an interesting step forward in making mixed reality more of a consumer proposition. Priced at £399 in the UK, it’s in the affordable range, but is quite different from some of the headset-based experiences out there – and is more expensive than the Meta Quest 2 (128GB).
But it’s undeniably portable, you can toss it in a pocket in its pocket and hardly know you’re carrying it around. As long as you have your phone, you can virtualize an experience on a big screen and free the content from your phone.
That’s why EE is bringing it to the UK – but success will depend on how the experience expands, what innovations come to MR Spaces, and how enticing that is in everyday use – something we’ll explore in a full review as soon as possible will.
- Compact and easy to carry
- Air Casting mode means a lot of content access
- Clever Interactions
- Not as immersive as Meta Quest 2
- Pricey for what is basically a bigger screen
- Requires more MR experience
design and build
- Looks like regular glasses
- A set of nose clips is provided
- Also supports prescription lenses
What is most appealing about the Nreal Air is that it looks very much like regular sunglasses. They weigh 79g, heavier than regular glasses but not very heavy compared to something like the HTC Vive Flow headset which weighs 189g.
So these glasses wear pretty much like other sunnies, with the design not too dissimilar to popular Ray-Ban models – and not too different from the Facebook Ray-Ban mashup.
The top of the glasses is thicker because that’s where the technology is housed, with two 3840 x 1080 pixel OLED displays projecting images onto the internal lenses. You can adjust the angle of the internal lenses to get sharper images, although we didn’t get to explore that option during our testing.
There’s also a range of nose pads so you can swap these out to get the perfect fit and ensure they sit naturally and comfortably on your head. We found them surprisingly comfortable and with the right nose clip they sit fairly well balanced on the face so they don’t feel like they’re falling off.
A case is included to store everything in – and that includes the cable as this isn’t a wireless solution – it needs to be connected to your phone.
get facility
- Nebula smartphone app
- USB-C cable connection
There’s a USB-C port on the end of the Nreal Air’s left arm, so you can plug in the included cable and plug it into your phone. We’ve tested the Nreal Air with Android devices – and while the goggles will work with iOS, we don’t have details on that support at this time.
Once connected to your phone, you need to turn on the glasses using the button controls on the right arm. There is both a power button and a brightness rocker with up to 400 nits of brightness. The glasses offer 5 hours of video playback.
There are also speakers built into the arms to provide audio, but this is controlled by the volume level on your source device. You can also prefer using headphones plugged into your phone, although we haven’t tested that option.
Once you’re set up and connected to the glasses, all you have to do is launch Nreal’s Nebula app.
This provides the interface that you use on the AR glasses, taking content from your phone and broadcasting it into the virtual world. After a brief interface demo, you’re good to go.
Exploring the Nebula
- MR Space and Air Casting modes
- Can change position and size of windows
- The phone acts as a controller
Once you’re in the app, there’s a simple interface that’s really broken down into two different modes. The first is MR Space – Mixed Reality Space – which allows you to open a series of apps or services in virtual windows.
MR room
This is where the bulk of the advanced mixed reality experience takes place, as this is where you can choose from experiences designed specifically for Nreal Air. Much of this is currently browser-based, allowing you to open numerous browser windows and place them in your viewing area.
The Nreal Air can track head movement, so you can open a main window (like a video service) and watch something, for example, while opening a secondary or tertiary window for other information – maybe a comment stream or social media.
Nreal Air makes it easy to resize and position windows and move them around in a virtual space, essentially letting you place them where you want – they might all be visible at once, or you might need a screen Turn your head to the left to be able to see it (for example). It’s the classic sci-fi moment where you have all the information around you in floating windows.
In MR Space mode, you control things with your phone, which when moved acts as a pointer that lets you click, tap, press and hold, swipe, etc. to interact with content and the environment.
air cast
The Air Casting option opens up a range of other experiences from apps you may already have on your phone. While it’s not quite as bespoke as the MR Spaces experience, it’s likely to be popular, since here you can open everything up on your phone and view it in a giant virtual display instead.
This is where the virtual screen size of 130 inches comes into play. The screen looks like it’s about 4 meters away, but it’s huge and fills your field of view for a truly immersive environment. We tested this with Xbox Cloud Gaming and invested some time in Forza Horizon 4 thanks to a connected Xbox controller.
Air Casting mode also lets you open up something like Netflix for a bigger cinematic experience instead of watching it on your phone’s display. If you’re concerned about the quality, considering you can still see the real world behind them, there’s a cover you can place over the glasses to effectively black out them.
The downside of air casting is that it has to keep your phone on all the time as it’s basically just mirroring what’s happening on your phone on a giant virtual screen.
Unlike a VR headset that attaches to your face, there’s still a sense of the outside world coming in from the bottom of the goggles. Still, playing Forza at face tempo, we got this slight sense of sluggishness from seeing movement but not feeling it. We need to spend more time with the Nreal Air to see how big the problem could be.
what you don’t get
As mentioned, there are no cameras in the Nreal Air, so there is no augmented reality. The glasses can’t pick up objects or scenes around you because they don’t know what you’re seeing.
This also means that the glasses cannot recognize hand movements for any gesture control. This is more about a content consumption experience and giving you the ability to experience things on a larger screen than the phone’s screen – with any size limitations that might entail.
It also doesn’t require internal storage like you might find with the Meta Quest 2 as this is really just a display device. In that sense, it’s closer to the HTC Vive Flow headset in terms of what it offers.
The Nreal Air is a wearable mixed reality solution that enables a fast smartphone tether to bring any content from your phone to a larger virtual screen. There are some clever elements here, but it needs more bespoke experiences to really justify the cost. But for those who want to share content from the smaller smartphone screen, this is an easy way.
PC Gaming Week (9-13 May) in collaboration with Nvidia GeForce RTX
Whether you’re a PC gaming veteran or a complete novice, we’ve got you covered!
Visit our PC gaming hub to get the latest news and reviews, see some great features and find details on the best products.
With a lot of great content dropping every day, be sure to bookmark the page and come back for your daily fix.
Writing by Chris Hall.
from toplistreviewspro.com https://ift.tt/g96TSLv
via Toplistreviewspro.com
Post a Comment