Viture’s cheapest AR glasses have the sharpest image clarity I’ve seen yet

What happened

I enjoy using display-mirroring glasses as a way to play Steam Deck games on a big screen, and I’m always on the hunt for the best pair. There’s still not one perfect model I can recommend to everyone, but Viture’s new $299. 99 Pro 2 have sharper-looking screens than models that cost hundreds more. It’s mostly thanks to the simple but effective diopter-adjusting dials that sit above each eye.

Practical impact for readers

The dials move the lenses, helping more people get the clarity they are hoping for out of the box. These have been in some past models that sold for around $400 or more, but now they’re in glasses that cost a lot less. Most models have few, or no, built-in methods to improve clarity. The only recourse for blurry screens is to pay $50 for prescription lens inserts. That, or just return the glasses. (The Pro 2 glasses support lenses, too, in case the dials alone don’t help.

Details worth verifying

Another perk here is the consistent sharpness across the Pro 2’s 50-degree field of view. I didn’t struggle to find a sweet spot their entire FOV is easy to parse, be it text or other small details, like minimaps in games or menus. Sure, their FOV is smaller than some competitors, but I’ll take smaller and sharper over bigger and blurrier. In gaming, the first readers to react are usually regular players, leak-watchers, and anyone waiting to decide on a console or a game purchase. The next step is to see whether the current signals harden into a durable change or fade as a short-lived experiment.

Who should act or wait

Screen sharpness aside, the Pro 2 are basic screen-mirroring glasses without extra features that let you augment how big the screens are or where you can put them virtually. Their micro OLED screens can mirror or extend another device’s screen via a tethered USB-C connection at up to 1080p with a 120Hz refresh rate — standard stuff. They have buttons to adjust volume, brightness, and the screens’ color temperature. They’re even simpler than Xreal’s A01 Plus , which includes a stabilization feature to keep the screens still when you make small head movements, though it’s not a good substitute for three degrees of freedom, a feature found in pricier glasses that both of these lack.

What is still unclear

In lieu of fancier features, Viture aimed to make these comfortable enough to wear for hours, and it mostly succeeded. The Pro 2 glasses weigh 63 grams (just a gram more than the A01 Plus), and both have a subtle clamping force that floats on top of my ears, touching the back of my head instead of painfully pressing on my cartilage. Their comfort let me play XCOM 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2 in 90-minute spurts — longer than I usually sit down to play games. I could do that with the A01 Plus, too, but I needed $50 prescription lenses to get similar clarity to what the Pro 2 offers out of the box. Even then, Xreal’s screens weren’t as consistently crisp.

Source notes

The Verge