In a nutshell
Could a pair of AR glasses replace your computer monitor? Adam puts the Xreal S1 glasses to the test, exploring the joys of having a virtual screen on your face, the limitations, and whether we're ready to ditch our monitors just yet.
Could I live without a monitor?
A few weeks ago, I had to send my ultrawide monitor back for repairs. It’s funny how a break in the tedium of life lets you reconsider things. For me, now painfully trapped inside the tiny box of my laptop screen, how could I not be taken by flights of fancy?
What if I could replace my monitor with a pair of glasses? Not a full virtual reality headset, but something that could put a virtual computer screen in front of my eyes, without needing a physical monitor at all.
Virtual reality has been around in consumer form for years, and Augmented Reality (AR), which is a mix of the digital and the real, is finally breaking ground. What if, one day, we can do away with all our screens? There's so much potential in this technology, but I'm not convinced we're quite there yet.
As much as I love the possibilities of AR, I'm less enthusiastic about the privacy implications of some wearable technology. Cameras, built-in AI, and unnecessary data collection aren't features I'm particularly interested in having on my face. I wanted something simpler: a display that does its job without trying to do everything else.
So I knew what I didn't want. The question was whether what I did want actually existed. After a bit of research, I eventually settled on the Xreal S1 AR glasses.
They’re just a dumb monitor on your face that uses DisplayPort over USB-C like any other external monitor. They look stupid, and my boss laughs at me every time she walks past, sure, but I think they’re shockingly good.
One thing I haven’t mentioned yet is that some of my screens are a bit too close to my face and my eyes are taking longer and longer to adjust their focal range when I look away. Now, with the magic of optics, the screen appears to be 4 metres away! I'm sure it'll come with its own issues, but at least I'm no longer staring at a screen just centimetres from my face. The screen is a crisp 1080p like it’s the early 2010s again, completely functional.
Here’s another benefit that I didn’t expect: like many other all-day-computer users, I have had RSI flare-ups for years. When I wrote code all day, it was bearable. The syntax was terse, I would stop and think more often, and there were tangential tasks to perform. But the LLM take-over has ruined that dynamic. This year, I have been writing sprawling little essays of English prose all day which has exacerbated my symptoms. But these glasses also act as a headset! One of my favourite things about this new era has been to speak my requests and listen to my LLM instead of typing. I’m far less worried about what I would do for work if I can’t use my hands anymore, and I can give my wrists and fingers time to recover. Surprisingly, the speaker sound doesn’t leak out much either, but I’m a little too embarrassed to speak aloud at the office.
So I can throw out all of my monitors now, right? I don’t think so. Let’s talk issues:
- The cable physically tethers me to my desk. The new WiFi 6E/7 standards look promising, though - I would be satisfied if high-speed wireless video transmission could let me use my phone as a receiver and power supply, then cable into my pocket instead.
- I still want to pin multiple screens in physical space, rather than just one. I see no reason why this shouldn’t be possible with a firmware update. Even in three degrees of freedom, it should just be a matter of frustum culling and telling my computer it’s a daisy chain of monitors.
- I find they still strain your eyes a bit. In particular, always looking upward into the prism feels very unnatural, but I found this feeling went away with use, like I was strengthening a muscle. I blink less too, which dries my eyes out. Lastly, there’s a risk of temporary vergence issues: if the render distance and reflected distance are different, your eyes might not converge to a point like they’re supposed to, which can lead to nausea. I’ve only read about that last one, though, and haven’t actually experienced it.
- The cable angle can easily push the glasses away from their ideal position on my face when I lie down or lean against a wall. It’s only really an issue if you want to watch TV on the ceiling while lying in bed.
- Looking through the prisms at my colleagues is a bit unpleasant, and I actually just prefer to take the glasses off.
- Text is very hard to read if plugged into a vertically oriented phone. It’s almost as though the pixels below a certain width get zeroed out. The output resolution is just the phone scaled up too, which is fine for media, but it’s a completely different experience than a computer.
So, is this the future?
All in all, I think it's a great tool for working on the go. If the goal is "escaping the tiny box", then these glasses are perfect for a working holiday. Just throw the laptop & charger, and now the glasses in your bag, and go! The experience is improved by an order of magnitude.
But for day-to-day life, I’m mostly back to normal monitors again. At least for now, I think it’s leaning more towards the expensive gimmick category. But it’s extremely borderline - if wireless video transmission and multiple virtual screens are successfully added (neither of which rely on a new physical product), I think that would be enough to seriously reconsider.