Augmented reality - or many of the variations thereof - is touted as the next frontier in technology. From large headsets to more portable devices, the promise of being able to access another interactive world is a tempting one. But it's a movement that hasn't taken off with quite the pace that many expected. There are lots of pieces to this puzzle from the source device and content, to the connectivity and the device you wear to experience this virtual world.

Nreal has showcased several different approaches to AR glasses and the Nreal Air offers a solution that's more palatable than some others. In the UK, EE has the exclusive on the Nreal Air, bringing it to market as an exclusive retailer, meaning you'll be able to step into virtual worlds using the new glasses and your phone. In other regions it's available from a range of retailers, such as Amazon in the US.

Nreal Air
Nreal Air

The Nreal Air is a portable solution to mixed reality, allowing a quick smartphone tether to take any content from your phone onto a bigger virtual screen. There are some clever elements here, but it needs more bespoke experiences to really justify the cost. But for those wanting to free content from the smaller smartphone screen, this is an easy way to do it.

Pros
  • Compact and easy to carry
  • Air Casting mode means plenty of content access
  • Clever interactions
Cons
  • Not as immersive as Meta Quest 2
  • Expensive for what is basically a bigger screen
  • Needs more MR experiences
  • Limited compatibility with phones

Design and build

  • Look like regular glasses
  • Range of nose clips provided
  • Also supports prescription lenses

The thing that will appeal most about the Nreal Air is that they look a lot like a regular pair of sunglasses. They weigh 79g, heavier than normal glasses, but not hugely weighty compared to something like the HTC Vive Flow headset, which is 189g.

Nreal Air photo 4
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These glasses sit on your face pretty similarly to other sunglasses, with looks not too dissimilar to popular Ray-Bans when it comes to the design - and not too different to the Facebook-Ray-Ban mashup.

The top of the glasses is thicker because it's here that the technology is housed, with two 3840 x 1080 pixel OLED displays projecting images down onto the internal lenses. You'll be able to adjust the angle of the glasses slightly by clicking the arms up and down slightly, and they are also compatible with prescription lenses for glasses wearers, although we haven't had the chance to experience this.

Nreal Air photo 8
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There are three different nose pads, so you can change these to get the perfect fit and make sure they sit naturally and comfortably on your head. We found them surprisingly comfortable and with the right nose clip, they sit on the face quite well-balanced, so they don't feel like they're going to fall off.

A case is supplied to keep everything in - and that will include the cable, because this isn't a wireless solution - it needs to be connected to your phone.

We've used the Nreal Air for prolonged watching sessions and found them to be comfortable. Once you have the right fit, we found that wearing them for a 4-hour flight to binge at TV series presents no problem.

Getting setup

  • Nebula smartphone app
  • USB-C cable connection

On the end of the left-hand arm of the Nreal Air is a USB-C connection, so you can attach the supplied cable and plug it into your phone. We've only tested the Nreal Air with Android devices - and although the glasses will work with iOS, we haven't tested the adapter or the experience you'd get from the iPhone - which basically amounts to mirroring.

This is also where the Nreal Air runs into a bit of a problem, as there isn't universal support for all Android devices - there's limited compatibility. The covers the likes of Oppo, Samsung and Sony and only flagship-level devices. We connected it to a Google Pixel and were told it was not supported, so this is something you'll have to check before you consider buying the Nreal Air. You can find a full compatibility list here.

Once connected to your phone, you'll have to turn on the glasses, with button controls on the right-hand arm. There's both a power button and a brightness rocker, with up to 400 nits of brightness offered. The power is drawn from your connected phone as these glasses have no internal battery, which is one of the reasons they are so light. That in turn means your phone will drain quickly and the usage will depend on what phone you have.

Nreal Air photo 2

There are speakers built into the arms to provide audio, but this is controlled by the volume on your source device. The in-built speakers are extremely limited in performance, basically pumping out audio in the region of your ears - if you want anything like an immersive experience you'll be much better off using true wireless headphones connected to your phone.

There's also a shade you can clip onto the outside of the glasses. This effectively provides a black background, changing these glasses from mixed reality to virtual reality, as you're then looking at the interface against that background rather than looking through at the rest of the world. As there's no recognition of the real world through the Nreal Air glasses, you don't get any augmented reality - it's not augmenting anything, despite the naming of these glasses.

Exploring the Nebula

  • MR Space and Air Casting modes
  • Can change position and size of windows
  • Phone acts as controller

Once you're all setup with the glasses in place and connected, all that remains is to fire up Nreal's Nebula app. This provides the bridge between your phone and the glasses, asking you to jump through a couple of hoops to register and get started, as well as asking for various permissions for your phone. It's not a great solution, but it's the solution that Nreal offers and it is, unfortunately, the weakest link in the whole system.

Once in the app, there's a pretty simple interface, which is divided into two different modes. The first is MR Space - mixed reality space - which lets you open a range of apps or services in virtual windows.

MR Space

This is where most of the mixed reality experience takes place, as it's here that you can pick from experiences designed specifically for Nreal Air. Much of this is based around a windowed experience, so you can open up windows, resize them and place them around your virtual space.

The Nreal Air can track head movements, so you can, for example, open a main window (like a video service) and be watching something, while opening a secondary or tertiary window for other information - perhaps a comments stream or social media.

Nreal Air photo 7
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The Nreal Air makes it easy to resize and position windows, moving them in a virtual space, so you're free to essentially place them where you want - that might be all visible at the same time, or perhaps with one screen needing you to turn your head to the left to be able to see it (for example). It's the classic sci-fi movie moment where you have all the information in floating windows around you.

When in MR Space mode you'll control things using your phone, which acts as a pointer as you move it around, lets you click, tap, press and hold, swipe and so on to interact with content and the environment.

There are some compatible apps, mostly designed by Nreal, providing some basic games and experiences, but nothing that really jumps out as worth the effort. You might also find yourself being asked to signin, because it's trying to run everything through its own browser in Nebula, rather than really working seamlessly with your phone. The user interface in general doesn't look or feel very advanced, and while some elements are pretty clever, it's a bit fiddly and it feels more like a half-baked solution than something you'd really want to spend much time in.

Nreal Air photo 9

Air Casting

The Air Casting option opens a range of other experiences from apps you might already have on your phone. While it's not quite as tailored as the MR Spaces experience, it's likely to be much more popular, as this is where you can open up anything on your phone and view it in a huge virtual display instead.

This is where the 130-inch virtual screen size comes into play. The screen will look as though it's about 4 metres away, but it's huge, filling your field of vision for a really immersive environment. We tested this with Xbox Cloud Gaming, putting in a little time on Forza Horizon 4, thanks to a connected Xbox controller - and we've also used it for watching movies on move, shutting out the outside world to enjoy content on a larger screen than you'd get from your phone.

Nreal Air photo 3
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It's in the Air Casting mode that you'd be able to open up something like Netflix for more of a cinema experience and over the months that we've been using the Nreal Air, it's this experience that we come back to: downloading content onto your phone to then watch while travelling - and because the Nreal Air look normal most people will just think you're wearing sunglasses. Because they're not totally sealed to the face, you also avoid things like motion sickness (in our experience).

The downside of Air Casting is that your phone needs to stay on all the time as it's just mirroring and that leads to fairly significant battery drain.

What you don't get

As we mentioned previously, there are no cameras on the Nreal Air, so there's no actual augmenting of reality - the glasses can't incorporate objects or scenes around you, because it doesn't know what you're looking at.

That also means that the glasses can't detect hand movements for any sort of gesture control. This is more about a content consumption experience and giving you a way to experience things on a bigger screen rather than on the screen of the phone - with any size limitations that that might bring.

There's also no need for internal storage as you might find on 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.

Nreal Air photo 10

Verdict

The Nreal Air is an interesting step forward in making mixed reality more of a consumer proposition. Priced at £399/$379, it's within the realms of the affordable, but remains markedly different to some of the headset-based experiences out there - and with the Meta Quest 2 (128GB) available at the same price, it does feel expensive for what you get.

But it's undeniably portable, you'll be able to throw this into a bag in its case and barely know that you're carrying it around. As long as you have your phone, you'll be able to virtualise a big screen experience 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 innovation comes to MR Spaces and how enticing this is in daily use - currently, the Nreal Air sells itself on that mirroring experience, but feels like it needs more development to offer greater native appeal.