I’ve grow to be keen on utilizing good glasses just like the XReal Air 2 ($399) that operate as a wearable show for my cellphone or pc. They sometimes present your linked gadget as a display screen locked proper in entrance of your eyes, a helpful characteristic, although not precisely true augmented actuality. You possibly can’t even entry that locked-screen expertise if in case you have a Google Pixel or a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, since good video glasses sometimes require USB-C connections that assist DisplayPort. XReal has a solution to each dilemmas with its Beam Professional, a $199 Android-based AR hub that works like a smartphone, has its personal interface that helps head monitoring, and may even shoot 3D images and movies. Its greatest options are restricted to XReal good glasses, however when you personal a pair, the Beam Professional is a enjoyable and helpful accent with a bit extra energy than smartphones in its value vary.
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Design: Seems to be Like a Telephone, Is not a PhoneThe Beam Professional appears and looks like a typical budget-to-midrange smartphone, however it’s not one. This $200 gadget is designed for streaming and dealing with the linked good glasses’ XR options, and that’s it. Measuring 6.4 by 2.9 by 0.4 inches (HWD), the Beam Professional is a bit large. You probably have smaller arms, you would possibly want to make use of each of them for navigation, however it does not really feel clunky or unwieldy. It has rounded corners like many smartphones, however its chassis is white plastic, so it doesn’t give the premium feel and look you get from the aluminum of an iPhone or the glass of a Galaxy or Pixel. Contemplating its value, that’s not stunning. The 6.5-inch, 2,400-by-1,080 LCD takes up the whole face of the Beam Professional, except for a black border that’s barely wider than the one across the iPhone 15’s display screen. A cutout close to the highest holds the 8MP selfie digital camera.
(Credit score: Will Greenwald)
Energy and multipurpose buttons sit on the precise fringe of the Beam Professional, and a pop-out tray for a microSD card (not included) is on the other edge. The underside of the Beam Professional options two USB-C ports, one for energy and one for connecting to good glasses.The again of the Beam Professional holds its most attention-grabbing side. Two digital camera lenses sit on the left facet, spaced pretty far aside. These are 50MP f/2.2 cameras with pixel binning to shoot 12MP photos or as much as 1080p60 or 4K30 movies. Extra necessary, the Beam Professional can shoot spatial images and movies just like the iPhone 15 Professional. These are 3D photos saved in a normal side-by-side format so any stereoscopic show, whether or not good glasses or a VR headset, ought to be capable of present them.
(Credit score: Will Greenwald)
Be able to enter your PIN repeatedly, as a result of the Beam Professional skimps on authentication. It has no fingerprint sensor, and the selfie digital camera doesn’t assist facial ID, so that you’ll be tapping in a quantity each time you wish to unlock it.Options & Elements: Peppy Efficiency for the PriceThe Beam Professional makes use of an unspecified Qualcomm Snapdragon spatial companion processor that appears comparable with the Snapdragon 600 collection SoC by way of energy. The bottom 128GB model has 6GB of RAM, whereas the 256GB model ($249) has 8GB of RAM.It runs on Android 14 with an AR layer XReal calls NebulaOS constructed on prime of it. NebulaOS is designed particularly for XReal good glasses and comes built-in instantly into the Beam Professional’s working system. The NebulaOS interface will open up in your good glasses once you plug them in, however provided that they’re made by XReal. The Beam Professional will output video to every other good glasses by way of the USB-C port, however NebulaOS will likely be inaccessible. Hold that in thoughts if you have already got RayNeo, Rokid, or Viture glasses, since you received’t get any of the AR options the Beam Professional presents.Utilizing the Beam Professional alone looks like utilizing any midrange inventory Android handset. It doesn’t have any cellphone options, however it has Wi-Fi 6, full entry to the Google Play retailer, and an unencumbered interface with three default widgets on the house display screen (good glasses standing, digital camera, and storage standing). None of them is critical, however you possibly can take away or rearrange them as simply as every other Android widget. The NebulaOS options for the good glasses are stored beneath the display screen’s interface, and so they aren’t disruptive and even seen when your glasses aren’t linked.
(Credit score: Primate Labs/PCMag)
We examined the Beam Professional like we check telephones, and it acquired a single-core rating of 922 and a multi-core rating of two,644 in Geekbench 6, outperforming the $199.99 Samsung Galaxy A15 (704 single, 1,855 multi). It additionally had the next multi-core quantity, surprisingly, than the $299.99 Galaxy A25 (2,058), however barely decrease for single-core (964). After all, each of these Galaxy handsets are telephones, and including mobile circuitry can considerably enhance the worth of a tool, so it is smart that the A15 would have a bit much less energy than the identically priced Beam Professional.XReal does not give an estimate for the Beam Professional’s battery life, however it lasted no less than six to eight hours on a cost in our exams. It is designed for use with AR good glasses, although, and it has two USB-C ports so it might probably keep charged whereas powering these glasses, so our regular cellular gadget battery exams do not actually apply to this product.NebulaOS: The XReal-Solely AR ExperiencePlug a pair of XReal good glasses into the Beam Professional, and the whole lot modifications. As an alternative of a mirrored display screen, the NebulaOS AR interface hundreds on the glasses, and the display screen turns into a big touchpad with Residence, Anti-mistouch, Seize, Report, and Scan buttons. The Residence button opens an apps checklist of icons organized in a cluster, just like the visionOS dwelling display screen of the Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional ($3,499).The XReal Air 2 Professional we examined the Beam Professional with does not have cameras, so captures from the gadget present solely what’s projected on the clear lenses towards a black background. The beneath picture presents a have a look at the NebulaOS interface.
NebulaOS on the XReal Air 2 Professional (Credit score: XReal/PCMag)
This view is mounted in place relative to the course you’re dealing with thanks to 3 levels of freedom (3DOF) movement monitoring. The menu and apps will keep in place as you progress your head as a substitute of being locked in entrance of your eyes like typical display screen mirroring. It feels way more pure than the locked place you get with out movement monitoring, however the apps will reduce off after they hit the sting of the glasses’ area of view, so it’s not practically as immersive because the eye-filling combined actuality of the Imaginative and prescient Professional or the Meta Quest Professional ($1,499.99).The 3DOF monitoring additionally means apps are stored in place in a fixed-distance sphere relative to you; you possibly can’t transfer nearer to them like you possibly can with 6DOF headsets. XReal says the upcoming $699 Air 2 Extremely good glasses allow 6DOF movement monitoring through their cameras.You possibly can swap to a view that retains the energetic window instantly in entrance of your imaginative and prescient no matter how you progress your head by urgent the Mode button on the facet of the Beam Professional. This makes the window comply with you slightly than conserving it locked in the midst of the glasses’ show, which feels a bit odd and floaty.The extremely superior eye-tracking and gesture-tracking controls of the way more costly Apple headset aren’t current, however as a substitute the Beam Professional itself turns into an air mouse that allows you to management a cursor by tilting it. Tapping the touchpad clicks the cursor; swiping left and proper scrolls by way of the apps checklist; and swiping up and down opens app and settings menus. Swiping is context-sensitive, so inside apps like Chrome, swiping up and down scrolls in these instructions. Nonetheless, pinch-to-zoom doesn’t work, no less than in Chrome and Google Maps, which is irritating.
(Credit score: XReal/PCMag)
Android isn’t identified for being very multitasking-friendly, and that applies to NebulaOS as effectively. You possibly can open plenty of apps to make use of without delay. Sadly, that quantity is 2. Popping up Chrome subsequent to YouTube so you possibly can learn and watch on the identical time is straightforward, however when you attempt to open one other app, the interface will inform you to shut one of many others. Apps are locked subsequent to one another, so you possibly can transfer them round solely as a single unit, not individually like with apps on the Imaginative and prescient Professional. To be honest, the Beam Professional is a cheap Android gadget with midrange specs, and each the working system and {hardware} restrict how effectively it might probably juggle a number of apps at a time, even with out the AR interface. Whether or not you utilize one or two apps, you possibly can transfer them wherever in a dome round you, together with instantly up. You can even resize them, and swap them between a vertical phone-like view and a wider panorama view. Resizing is locked to your chosen side ratio, although, so your choices are nonetheless restricted.NebulaOS has its personal XReal Retailer along with the usual Google Play app retailer, however it’s pointless. It has solely a dozen or two apps, none distinctive to the Beam Professional or particularly for AR good glasses, and all of that are already on Google Play. Successfully all apps will likely be displayed as floating variations of the cellphone apps.Cameras Designed for 3DSpatial images and spatial movies are two of the Beam Professional’s largest options, and so they work very effectively. Each forms of media are captured in size-by-side codecs that double the horizontal decision of the picture to indicate the total views of every digital camera. Spatial images are saved as 22-megapixel photos at 7,680 by 2,880, and spatial movies are 3,840 by 1,080. This lets the Beam Professional, or every other gadget that may output to stereoscopic shows like good glasses, present 3D photos. The iPhone 15 Professional and the Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional do the identical factor, and sure, this does imply that spatial images and movies are finally no totally different than the 3D media we’ve been in a position to see since Sir Charles Wheatstone conceived the concept within the 1830s. We now have two eyes, so all we’d like are two photos taken from barely totally different positions.
A spatial photograph taken on the Beam Professional. (It is stereoscopic 3D, so it is two images subsequent to one another.) (Credit score: Will Greenwald)
The consequence could be very efficient. Viewing spatial images and movies on a linked XReal Air 2 Professional provides a robust impression of depth. Movies are captured at 60 frames per second, so motion appears pretty pure and never jerky or disorienting. There’s nonetheless the potential for movement illness as a result of any motion within the video is totally separate from how you progress your head, however since movement monitoring retains the image mounted in a single place, it isn’t a lot worse than watching a film with a really shaky digital camera on a TV or theater display screen.
The cameras do not actually do Pixel justice in 2D. (Credit score: Will Greenwald)
The cameras don’t fare very effectively for day-to-day capturing, although. Whereas they use pixel-binned 50MP sensors, their sensor and lens mixtures produce barely fuzzy and noisy images. Photos of the town beneath a vivid, cloudy sky present a great deal of grain; indoor photos of my cat are even much less flattering; and selfies with sturdy indoor lighting are just a little blurry. They give the impression of being wonderful zoomed out on the Beam Professional’s display screen or social media posts, however they don’t maintain up when you begin wanting nearer. The equally priced Samsung Galaxy A15 5G cellphone has a lot better cameras however clearly lacks the spatial photograph and video options or the NebulaOS interface.Verdict: An Attention-grabbing AR AccessoryThe Beam Professional is a enjoyable gadget if you need a style of head-tracking AR, and you have already got or are prepared to purchase a pair of XReal good glasses. Its NebulaOS interface is a little more participating than the everyday mirrored display screen locked in entrance of your eyes that the majority linked gadgets allow, although it’s nonetheless very restricted, and it handles multitasking awkwardly. The cameras are a enjoyable novelty and allow you to take 3D images and movies you possibly can view on different gadgets that assist stereoscopic 3D. Nonetheless, they’re mediocre at greatest for normal snapshots. The Beam Professional is finally a reasonably area of interest AR hub that is available in a phone-size physique, useful however not spectacular in any method outdoors of its equipment-specific options. For $199, although, that’s about what you possibly can anticipate from this kind of gadget. You probably have XReal glasses or are searching for AR good glasses and haven’t dedicated to a model but, the Beam Professional is a reasonably cheap accent that is value testing.
Professionals
Can shoot 3D images and movies
Good efficiency for the worth
Intriguing NebulaOS AR interface
The Backside Line
The XReal Beam Professional is a smartphone-like AR hub that may take spatial images and movies and provides a head-tracking interface to XReal good glasses.
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About Will Greenwald
Lead Analyst, Client Electronics
I’ve been PCMag’s dwelling leisure professional for over 10 years, protecting each TVs and the whole lot you would possibly wish to hook up with them. I’ve reviewed greater than a thousand totally different client electronics merchandise together with headphones, audio system, TVs, and each main recreation system and VR headset of the final decade. I’m an ISF-certified TV calibrator and a THX-certified dwelling theater skilled, and I’m right here that will help you perceive 4K, HDR, Dolby Imaginative and prescient, Dolby Atmos, and even 8K (and to reassure you that you simply don’t want to fret about 8K in any respect for no less than a number of extra years).
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