Xreal has announced the price of its long-awaited Aura mixed-reality glasses: $1,279 for the base model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, $20 less than Meta's recently revealed VR Glasses at $1,299. A second Aura configuration with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage costs $1,499, per The Verge.
The Aura runs Android XR, built in partnership with Google, and is the first pair of transparent Android XR glasses. Preorders are open only to people who already placed a paid reservation; open orders for everyone else will start "in the coming weeks," and shipping begins in the US, Canada, Japan and South Korea, with more regions in 2027.
Xreal Aura vs Meta VR Glasses: hands-on impressions
Wired's Boone Ashworth spent roughly 30 to 45 minutes with the Meta VR Glasses at Meta Connect in September and attended an Aura demo held deliberately a day later. His verdict: the two are direct competitors with very similar experiences, but they diverge in use.
Meta's glasses lean toward immersion. They run everything already available on Quest devices on a 5K micro-OLED screen, add more cameras and eye tracking, and make hand tracking feel precise, so typing on a virtual keyboard is almost seamless, per The Verge. The trade-off is video passthrough, which can look fuzzy.
The Aura leans toward the real world. Its lenses use true optical passthrough: switch the screen off and it behaves like an ordinary pair of glasses, which makes walking around far easier. Engadget found the visuals extremely sharp and bright even in sunny outdoor conditions, and the display uses a 70-degree diagonal field of view, one of the largest yet on a transparent pair.
Xreal Aura specs and price
Both devices are lightweight because neither packs the heavy computing inside the frames. Each attaches by cable to a wired compute puck that holds the processor and battery and lives in your pocket.
