The Xreal One Pro isn't the full smart glasses experience you want, but it does still give you a decent spatial computing experience — assuming you're fine with a cable snaking down to your pocket.
There have been rumors about Apple introducing its smart eyewear for years, but it still seems like a long time away from becoming a reality. While Apple is taking it's time — as it always does — on perfecting the form, others have hit the market.
The latest installment from Xreal has arrived, in the form of the Xreal One Pro. Following on from the Xreal One from earlier in 2025, the Xreal One Pro goes a few steps further by upping the game on the display.
In a market that has the 600-pound gorilla that is Meta making big moves, Xreal has to push harder to make a dent in the market. Analysts keep claiming that the so-called Apple Glass will arrive and saturate the rest of the market.
Today is not that day. In the interim, there's the Xreal One Pro for folks that wisely avoid the Meta ecosystem like the plague.
Xreal One Pro review: Physical design
The Xreal One Pro are chunky sunglasses from the outside. Thick arms and frames are used to hide some of the electronics, but it can't really be hidden completely.
The arms hold the Bose-powered speakers, as well as a USB-C port on the left hook, for wired connectivity to other devices. The right side has a brightness rocker and a menu button below your temple, and an extra shortcut button is on the top.
The black arms meet the front of the glasses with a small metal hinge section on each side. This is nicely sprung, I don't expect any long-term issues with it.
Xreal One Pro review: Inside the case
The main external glass can tint darker to look like sunglasses, or can lighten up to be more see-through. This is in part to help you see the AR elements easier, but also to give yourself a bit of privacy when looking at content.
That tint hides a second set of lenses that appear within the frame, which is where the actual augmented reality display lives.
Xreal One Pro review: Glass for viewing, glass for seeing through.
If you're a glasses wearer, you do get mounting points for inserting prescription lenses, which you will have to obtain separately. This isn't a big issue for anyone who has used other headsets, but a trip to the optometrist will be in order.
The bridge section also has fairly large nose pads, which sit on metal arms you can move for comfort. Xreal also includes three pairs of those silicone nose pads, as they are effectively expendable.
Speaking of comfort, the One Pro weighs in at 3.1 ounces, versus the 1.8 ounces that others in my residence use. That weight is a far cry from a full headset like Apple Vision Pro, but it's still something you'll notice wearing for long periods of time.
Xreal One Pro review: Display and audio
The main difference this time around is in the display technology in use. While the previous One used a Sony 0.68-inch Micro OLED projector as a display, the new One Pro uses an updated 0.55-inch version.
Xreal's new Optic Engine 4.0 uses a display that has a wider 57-degree field of view, versus 50 degrees in the One. It also manages to do so while reducing the size of the display element by 40 percent.
For reference, the Apple Vision Pro field of vision is about 100 degrees.
Xreal One Pro review: There is a larger field of view in this version.
To the end user, this means an increase in the maximum display area, so virtual screens are larger than the previous model.
The new version is also much brighter at 700 nits versus 600 nits in the previous model. At 4 million pixels, there's an effective 1080p resolution at play, which is about what you would expect an AR display of this type to display.
This makes more of a difference than you'd think. From my experience with the previous model compared to this one, the extra brightness makes the unit much more usable in bright lights. It doesn't matter at all at dusk or night, though.
There's also a 120Hz refresh rate, similar to the non-Pro release, to reduce the chance of flicker and minimize motion sickness. Each headset is also calibrated for color before shipment.
There are two sizes of the Xreal One Pro, when it comes to dealing with interpupillary distances (IPD). The Medium has a center point of 63mm and a range of 57mm to 66mm, while the Large has a 69mm center point and a range of 66mm to 75mm.
For audio, there are new speakers versus the One, which has a new sound chamber design. It's tuned by engineers from Bose.
It can also record audio, with stereo voice input for online meetings. Noise reduction can process your voice to make it clearer while in moderately noisy environments.
Xreal One Pro review: Augmented Reality
Unlike a headset like the Apple Vision Pro, there's some processing happening on the device itself, but not related to content. It does, however, handle how you view that content.
Much like a screen, you connect your source content up to the Xreal One Pro via a port, in this case the USB-C connection on the hook. Any device that can transmit a DisplayPort signal via USB-C can be used with the glasses.
Xreal One Pro review: The USB-C port is placed so the cable is behind your ear
That means you can connect most computers, modern smartphones, and tablets, including the iPhone and iPad, and use it as an external display. If your host device doesn't have a USB-C connection or support it, there's the option of using an HDMI to USB-C adapter to do the same thing.
The real work the glasses handle is positioning. Its built-in Xreal X1 chip manages putting the content in virtual space, so you can see it in front of your eyes.
It's more involved than that, as it has to deal with your head movements, translating them into adjustments for the virtual screen. It handles the Spatial bit of Spatial Computing.
This is handled chiefly in its Anchor setting, which lets users pin the display in one place in the room, with three degrees of freedom. This can also take the form of an ultra-wide display, which Xreal says can be up to 310 virtual inches in size.
A second mode, Follow, is more straightforward as a floating display that remains in front of your face, no matter where you look. Another Side View mode does the same thing but in miniature, creating a small screen for the corner of your vision while you are occupied with real-world events.
Xreal One Pro review: Small displays relative to the externally-visible glass, but it's enough.
This all happens without needing a separate app to configure the display, or using a hub as an in-between device. This is a nice touch, I'm not a fan of a helper-app for a display implementation like this.
These settings can be managed using the included menu button, giving you options for the screen size, the various modes, the distance from your eyes, and even the color temperature.
Xreal One Pro review: A clear, incomplete vision
The Xreal One Pro is an evolution of what came before it. But it's not quite the smart glasses experience that everyone believes, using augmented reality. As it is, it's a display for your eyes, that does the screen-in-mid-air trick really well.
You can't use it like an independent headset, you will always need to use it with a host device.
And the cable that comes with it broke, within days of arrival. Expect to need a better cable from the get-go. Fortunately, just about any USB-C cable will do, here.
One big omission is the lack of a camera, which slots in under the bridge. The Xreal Eye is a 12MP camera that can be used to capture images, like Meta's Ray-Ban partnership glasses.
However, its real party piece is that it can upgrade the Xreal One Pro from 3 degrees of freedom to 6 degrees of freedom.
This is a missing element that could've certainly upgraded the experience for users, but instead arrives as part of a $99 add-on. It's something that really should've been part of a "Pro" product, but now becomes an afterthought.
Another missing aspect is wireless use. There is another add-on in the Xreal Beam Pro, but that's not included for the entry price. In theory a USB-C HDMI wireless adapter can be used too, but that's chunky and unwieldy.
And the Beam Pro is an Android device. Pass.
Xreal One Pro review: More a smart display than what you would think of from smart glasses.
With off-device processing of content absolutely required, the Xreal One Pro are certainly not what you would consider to be fully-fledged smart glasses. That said, it's certainly a neat head-mounted display that can do some display-in-space trickery, and can even do photos if you add the camera to it.
Its overall larger viewable area is a welcome benefit over its predecessor, but that's still a relatively minor change to the overall design.
But even so, as a device you physically connect to an iPhone or iPad to see its display floating in mid air, still it's not the experience that people would typically expect from a smart glasses experience.
Xreal One Pro Pros
- Looks like chunky and dimmable sunglasses
- Smaller but bigger and better display area
- Relatively lightweight construction
Xreal One Pro Cons
- Requires a host to display content, no on-device content processing
- 6 degrees of freedom needs the optional camera
- The included cable is terrible, get a better one
Rating: 3 out of 5
The Xreal One Pro is excellent hardware from an optics standpoint, burdened by a tether and a lack of wireless streaming from a host device. It's fun to use, and obviously lighter than the Apple Vision Pro, but for the extra costs you need to pay for wireless streaming, and a camera, it has a very specific market that I'm not sure exists right now.
Where to buy the Xreal One Pro
The Xreal One Pro is available from Xreal directly, priced at $599.99. It's also available from Amazon for $599.
