A while ago, I reviewed the XREAL Air XR glasses. They were the first set of AR glasses that I purchased and it was truly awesome using them on trips and such with my phone and Steam Deck. There's been a few accessories produced for the XREAL line of glasses and today, XREAL is adding a new peripheral that's offering a few interesting features to enhance your XREAL AR glasses.
The Beam Pro is a Snapdragon powered companion device running Android 14. You'll be able to install apps from the Google Play store and run some things such as games and media players without having to plug it into your phone. XREAL is touting that these apps will run in a spatial environment that's either 3DoF or 6DoF depending on the type of glasses you have plugged in. Currently with the Nebula app, you can use your phone to navigate the environment. With the Beam Pro, an included touchpad can be used to navigate the environment.
For gaming, access to the Play Store means you can install some nice streaming apps easily like Steam Link and Xbox Cloud Gaming to name a few. With Bluetooth 5.2 support, you can hook a controller up to the Beam Pro and play games with your XREAL glasses streaming through the Beam Pro.
With the Beam Pro, the screen can be placed in the air and stuck there for you to look back to. If you rather, you can switch a smooth follow mode, which makes the screen center in your view in a nice gentle motion. It can help those who aren't used to having a screen move quickly in front of them when it's stuck to your field of view.
Since you can watch movies and view images in 3D, the Beam Pro has two 50MP cameras that lets you capture pictures and video in 3D. It supports 1080P 60FPS 3D video so you can get some smooth looking movies from the Beam Pro.
NVIDIA's CloudXR tech is also being fully supported with the Beam Pro.
There's going to be two versions of the Beam Pro for sale. One will be Wi-Fi only while the other will support 5G mobile connections. There will also be two SKUs with one having 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. The other will contain 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Both can expand the storage with an SD card. Pricing will start at $199. For those who bought the original Beam, you'll be able to get $50 off for a limited time, which is a nice offering.
Pre-orders start now with deliveries expected to start in August.