XREAL Air 2 Ultra

The XREAL Air 2 Ultra is XREAL’s spatial computing play: the Air 2 display-glasses platform with two 3D environment sensors added to the frame for full positional tracking, announced at CES in January 2024 and shipped that March at $699. AR Compare’s record marks it discontinued, and this review treats that status honestly throughout. The readable record is launch-window coverage, so this review aggregates Tom’s Guide’s hands-on review, Engadget’s CES demo report, Wareable’s hands-on, and UploadVR’s launch and ecosystem reporting. AR Compare has not performed hands-on testing of this device; every observation below is attributed to the cited sources, and the category scores are an editorial aggregate of cited reviewer sentiment. Product facts were cross-checked against AR Compare’s spec record for the Air 2 Ultra (Sony Micro-OLED panels at a recorded 1920x1080 per eye and a recorded 120Hz, a recorded 52-degree field of view, a recorded 500 nits, roughly 80 grams, USB-C tethered with no onboard battery or compute, $699).

How This Review Was Compiled

The entire readable record is launch-window hands-on coverage from CES 2024 — no long-term scored review of the Air 2 Ultra was reachable for this aggregation, so the sources below are demos, not lived-with verdicts. Tom’s Guide’s Jason England published the fullest hands-on and the most optimistic one. Engadget’s Richard Lai logged roughly 20 minutes across the demo stations and is the most critical on tracking, while Wareable’s James Stables covered a shorter Pepcom demo. UploadVR’s David Heaney did not go hands-on; his launch and follow-up reporting supplies the compatibility limits and the fate of the one flagship partner product. Where the sources disagree — chiefly on how well hand tracking worked — both readings are reported below rather than smoothed over.

Six Degrees of Freedom: Why the Ultra Exists

Every source frames the Ultra the same way: the return of true positional tracking to XREAL for the first time since the old Nreal Light, per UploadVR, via two 3D environment sensors built into the frame. That upgrade moves the glasses from a head-fixed virtual screen to real spatial computing — UploadVR notes the sensors mesh the actual geometry of a room where the Nreal Light could only detect flat planes, alongside hand tracking, permanent spatial anchors, and image tracking. The room-scale half of that promise demoed well. Engadget reports the tracking ran smoothly, including walking right up to large virtual avatars, and Tom’s Guide calls the anchored-workspace demo seriously impressive, but not perfect.

Hand tracking is where the record genuinely splits. Tom’s Guide judged it good but inconsistent: practically flawless with palms up, yet hands often disappear when flipped over, and the reviewer’s tattoos and even the table color interfered. Engadget is harsher, reporting a struggle to pinch a light-bar color slider that landed on the wrong hue several times, laggy interactions, and one outright crash during which the tethered phone got worryingly warm — issues XREAL’s CEO acknowledged seeing on the show floor. Wareable sits between the two: the skeletal rendering of the hands felt a little jarring, but pinch controls worked far more accurately than expected. The aggregate reading is a sensing platform that was real but rough at launch.

The Display: The Air Platform at Its Widest

The display drew the least argument and the most praise. The recorded 52-degree field of view was the widest of the Air line — up from the recorded 46 degrees of the XREAL Air 2 and Air 2 Pro — a step Tom’s Guide calls small but important as spatial computing grows. Behind it sit the same Sony Micro-OLED panels at a recorded 1920x1080 per eye, a recorded 120Hz, and a recorded 500 nits, with the Air 2 Pro’s electrochromic dimming carried over so the lenses tint at a button press. In Wareable’s words, it was the clarity of the on-screen visuals that impressed, and the dimmed demo worlds felt genuinely immersive. The one hardware complaint is sound — the directional audio is a little louder than before but still pretty tinny, in Tom’s Guide’s judgment, because the frame only fits tiny tweeters.

Comfort, the Titanium Frame, and the Tether

Comfort holds up despite the added sensors. At a recorded 80 grams the Ultra runs 5 grams heavier than the Air 2 Pro, per Engadget, and the titanium frame is what keeps the gain that small — Tom’s Guide adds that it gives the rim around the lenses a nice metallic look and feel, and reports wearing the glasses for long stretches without strain. Wareable calls the wayfarer design a little chunky yet still on the more comfortable and wearable end of the AR scale. The structural trade-off is the tether: there is no onboard battery or compute, so the glasses draw power over USB-C from whatever runs them, and the battery score of 5 follows this site’s category convention for tethered display glasses rather than any standalone runtime.

Compatibility was the quiet catch in the record. The full spatial stack required a Samsung Galaxy S22 or S23 at launch — and not the European Exynos S22 — per UploadVR’s reporting, with a compute puck promised for everyone else but never given a date or price. As a plain virtual display the reach was wider: Engadget lists iPhone 15 handsets plus Windows and Mac machines through XREAL’s Nebula software, and AR Compare’s record adds the XREAL Beam accessory as a host. Buyers outside the Samsung path, in other words, got Air 2 Pro behavior from a more expensive product.

The Ecosystem That Never Arrived

XREAL said the quiet part at launch: these were positioned as a developer device, mainly intended, per UploadVR, for people building against an SDK that would receive significant upgrades in the coming months. Engadget’s demo reel makes the gap concrete — a virtual desktop, a three-movie cinema, smart-light control, and virtual pets, all first-party concepts with no third-party apps behind them — and its headline warning was that success would ultimately depend on the app ecosystem. Tom’s Guide reached the same conclusion, advising that ordinary buyers could not yet do much more with the Ultra than with a standard pair of Air 2 glasses.

The ecosystem bet then failed in public. The Spacetop G1, a $1,900 screenless laptop with the Air 2 Ultra built in, was cancelled in October 2024, with maker Sightful exiting hardware entirely and pivoting to Windows software for XREAL glasses, per UploadVR. AR Compare’s record now marks the Air 2 Ultra itself discontinued: the catalog buy slot sits out of stock, and the maker’s own product page no longer resolves. The 6DoF hardware story continued in XREAL’s later flagships instead, including the XREAL One Pro.

Value at $699

At $699, the Ultra asked a steep premium over the mainstream Air line — quite a hefty jump, in Tom’s Guide’s words — while Engadget records XREAL pitching it as the affordable alternative to the $3,499 Apple Vision Pro and a near-peer in price to the $499 Quest 3. On pure hardware the case was real: these were the lightest and cheapest true 6DoF glasses of their generation. Tom’s Guide’s advice at the time was to buy only as an investment in a future meeting point of VR capability and AR portability, and that future went to other products. Given the discontinued status, the aggregate treats the Ultra as a benchmark of what its generation achieved rather than a current purchase recommendation.

Who Should Buy the XREAL Air 2 Ultra

Per the aggregated consensus: almost nobody today — the honest launch-era answer was developers building 6DoF experiences on XREAL’s SDK with a supported Samsung flagship in hand, plus collectors of a genuinely important piece of AR hardware history. Who should skip: buyers who want current display glasses, who are better served by XREAL’s supported One-series line; anyone expecting a working app catalog, which never arrived; iPhone and PC owners, who only ever got virtual-display duty from it; and anyone unwilling to buy discontinued hardware with no remaining first-party purchase path.

Scores are aggregates of the cited reviews and hands-on reports, not AR Compare hands-on results.

Sources

• Tom’s Guide — Xreal Air 2 Ultra hands-on review: The most promising VR/AR glasses yet
• Engadget — Xreal Air 2 Ultra hands-on: Next-gen AR glasses in need of killer apps
• Wareable — Hands on: Xreal Air 2 Ultra AR smartglasses review
• UploadVR — Xreal Air 2 Ultra Are AR Glasses Powered By Samsung Galaxy S Phones Via USB-C
• UploadVR — Sightful Cancels Spacetop, Will Release Windows Software For Xreal Air 2 Ultra Instead