This tiny tablet is a smart upgrade for AR glasses

Xreal is one of the few companies trying to sell mass-market augmented reality headsets without an existing big tech empire. But its latest product isn’t a pair of glasses; it’s a phone-sized Android tablet designed to keep you using them. At last week’s Augmented World Expo (AWE) the company announced the Beam Pro, a combination battery, app repository, and 3D video recorder. It’s a pragmatic solution to a very obvious problem — even if, at first glance, I wish it were weirder.

Xreal’s glasses — the Air 2 and Air 2 Ultra — have generally required some kind of third-party device like a phone, laptop, or Steam Deck. (There was a bare-bones control box called the Beam, but it wasn’t a big focus for the company.) The Beam Pro is meant to ease this requirement. It’s a dedicated Android machine that won’t cannibalize your phone’s battery life, using a custom AR launcher and featuring some unusual hardware elements, particularly a pair of cameras for recording stereoscopic 3D video. It’s Xreal’s attempt to bolster the small field of consumer AR and go beyond simply making glasses while it waits to see how the market shapes up.

When you pick up the Beam Pro, like I did at AWE, the first impression is that it feels exactly like a 6.5-inch Android phone. (We’re calling it a tablet because there’s no phone app, though it supports 5G data.) The design is a bit chunky, but it’s got a handsome black and white color scheme with red accents and feels decently solid for a $199 device. There are only a couple of signs it’s doing something unusual: it’s got two USB-C ports on the bottom — one for the headset and one for a charging cable — and two big cameras on the back. The software also initially seems like a lightly skinned version of Android, though there’s a custom recording app for the cameras.

But the Beam Pro’s purpose becomes clear when you plug in an Xreal headset. Connecting the device will call up a monochrome screen that looks like a big trackpad, its upper edge lined with supplementary buttons, like one for starting screen capture on the glasses. The main interface moves to the glasses, where you’ll see rows of Android icons floating in space. From there, you can control your experience by pointing the Beam Pro at icons like a remote and tapping the screen, or — for Xreal glasses that come with built-in cameras, including the Air 2 Ultra — making gestures with your hands.

The Beam Pro’s system is better than no in-AR controls at all, a situation that was common while using Xreal glasses with an ordinary phone. Xreal has fixed some annoying problems it once had with streaming apps like Netflix, which used to be simply mirrored in a way that wouldn’t even let you turn off the phone’s screen. Your videos can now be pinned comfortably in virtual space while you control them with the remote. And there’s some nice use of hardware buttons on the Beam Pro. What you might assume is a phone’s mute switch actually makes the virtual screen toggle between smoothly following you and being pinned in place.

That emphatically doesn’t mean the Beam Pro is a great controller. I only used it for a short demo, but it made me long for the days of Google’s slightly quirky, lovingly crafted Daydream VR remote. I’m pretty sure a very wide textureless glass panel is not the ideal approach for a one-handed point-and-tap device, even if it’s a form people are used to.

A few individual elements also feel half-baked. When you need to type something, the Beam Pro simply pops a default Android keyboard (or something very close to it) over the bottom half of its screen, and you can’t use the main tap panel to confirm any text you entered. You can swap between hand gestures and tapping the tablet, but it requires digging into a menu and switching control systems halfway through the interaction, when a hardware toggle or one-tap button would be more convenient. You can’t use the glasses as a viewfinder for taking stereoscopic videos, either, something I almost instinctively tried to do.

On top of that, the idea of stereoscopic cameras is cool — and, as my colleague David Pierce notes, is a nice way to distinguish the Beam Pro from other Android devices. But until way more people have VR or AR headsets, it will be hard to share videos widely in all their 3D glory. Xreal videos can be displayed on non-Xreal devices like the Vision Pro, but even that’s still a tiny market.

Xreal CEO Chi Xu says the current design is just a jumping-off point for the product. “This is probably going to be the generation that looks the most similar to a phone,” Chi says. “Getting a brand-new user interface and experience is going to be extremely challenging — not for us, but for the user to adapt to the new gadget. So we’re literally trying to mimic what people have been used to for the past 20 years.”

Even if I wish using the Beam Pro felt better, it does seem to cover what you’d need from an Xreal controller. The main use cases for the glasses are streaming video, which only requires a bare-bones remote, and gaming, which demands a full-fledged Bluetooth gamepad or a whole different device like the Steam Deck.

And ultimately, Chi doesn’t see Xreal building a completely standalone system. “We want to partner with bigger platforms,” he says, potentially including players like Meta and Google. The company is working on an AR software layer dubbed NebulaOS, which it hopes will cement its position as more than just a glasses maker. Right now, though, most computing companies either aren’t making serious public moves into AR or — like Apple — want to maintain their own walled-garden augmented realities. In this environment, devices like the Beam Pro are necessary for smaller players to survive.

But Xreal’s long-term position still seems risky. Countless consumer AR startups have been launched since the early 2010s, and most have either folded (like the non-Mark Zuckerberg Meta), been acquired by a big company for a nebulous future product (like the now Google-owned North), or pivoted to a purely business-focused model (like Magic Leap). To the extent consumer AR exists, it’s dominated by big tech companies that tend to either acquire or crush potential competition.

Chi, though, thinks there’s a chance for the company to find its niche. “I think it’s too early to tell how the profit model will look in the AR space,” he says. “We don’t think we’re just hardware — if you can be a bigger part of helping people be more efficient, be more powerful, I think you’re going to have a fair share of that profit.”