At $1,279, Google’s Xreal Aura will go head-to-head with Meta’s VR Glasses

Two weeks ago, journalists in the San Francisco Bay Area got to try two hot new wearables that weigh only around 100 grams: the just-revealed Meta VR Glasses, and the long-awaited transparent Google XR glasses built in partnership with Xreal. It turns out they’re going head-to-head. Xreal has just opened Aura pre-orders starting at $1,279, $20 less than the Meta VR Glasses.

That’s for the Xreal Aura with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage; there’ll also be a 16GB / 512GB config for $1,499. (Xreal couldn’t tell us whether the 16GB of RAM would be important for some apps by publish time.)

Both the Google / Xreal Aura and Meta’s VR Glasses let you overlay virtual objects and desktops on the real world. Both are relatively lightweight because they’ve got a cord — their Qualcomm Snapdragon Reality Elite chips and batteries both live in a compute puck, which runs either Meta’s Horizon OS or Android XR. Both greet you with a grid of floating app icons to choose from.

But they’re very different experiences in practice, primarily because the Google / Xreal Aura has transparent lenses, while the Meta VR Glasses use passthrough vision to let you see the real world and offers more immersion. While the Xreal Aura has one of the largest transparent fields of view yet at 70 degrees diagonal, it’s still smaller than Meta’s passthrough glasses. I wrote all about it in this story, and it’s just one of many differences.

The Meta VR Glasses also have eye tracking, like the Apple Vision Pro, so you can select things just by looking at them and pinching fingers resting on your lap; the Google / Xreal Aura has a touchpad built into the compute puck and hand-tracking to give you virtual laser pointers. (Both let you connect to other peripherals and display other devices too — and you can plug devices with USB-C DisplayPort video right in.)

And, of course, you’ve got your Android apps inside the Xreal Aura, or your Quest games inside the VR Glasses.

I don’t think any journalist can tell you which is better yet; you may want to wait for reviews. We also have yet to test Android XR extensively: while Samsung and Google did technically ship the $1,799 Galaxy XR with Android XR last year, they didn’t send one to The Verge for review.

The Meta VR Glasses aren’t due until spring 2027, but Xreal isn’t necessarily shipping lots of pairs before then. Today, the only people who can preorder the Xreal glasses are those who already put in a reservation, and only the first 2,000 “Founder’s Edition” pairs are necessarily coming at “launch.” Those will ship this year, Xreal CEO and co-founder Chi Xu tells The Verge.

It might not take till the end of the year. Xreal’s press release does say they “will begin shipping soon” and that the “launch” is “now just weeks away,” but those are wiggly, and again, those timeframes are just for early adopters. If you don’t have a preorder, “Orders will open to the general public in the coming weeks.” The glasses will also only ship in the US, Canada, Japan, and South Korea to start, before expanding to other regions in 2027.

I’m already a fan of Xreal’s glasses and how they let me watch my 3D movies with a 57-degree field of view, and I’m intrigued by the puck. I’d love to see how much more useful these glasses are with a 70-degree view.