Xreals Aura smartglasses will cost $1,279, preorders open soon

In 2025, Google unveiled an ambitious project called Android XR. The XR stands for "extended reality," and it's an Android-based platform (developed jointly by Google and Samsung) for smart eyewear.

Back then, however, you could only see prototypes, and despite later demos of a product called Project Aura, no Android XR smart glasses were commercially available...until now.

Yes, we're aware of Samsung's Galaxy XR, but that's a full-featured Android XR headset, not a pair of smart glasses.

With the aura (sorry) of mystery behind us, the actual product is a pair of smart glasses manufactured by Xreal, simply called Xreal Aura, and now they're finally available for pre-order.

Xreal says the Aura is not a headset or "display glasses;" instead, it's "spatial computing eyewear." The Aura glasses are very light (95 grams) because they're connected to a separate physical device (roughly the size of a smartphone) that runs Android XR. Equipped with a Snapdragon Reality Elite chip, see-through displays with a 70-degree field of view, hand-tracking, and Bose-branded audio tech, they come very close to a mixed reality headset while still looking (almost) like a normal pair of sunglasses.

The Xreal Aura can be used for watching movies and TV shows, listening to music, playing games, working on documents, attending virtual meetings, and exploring your surroundings with the help of AI, and you can do all of that while on the move. Oh, and that separate device that you connect your glasses to? It also doubles as a trackpad and a fingerprint scanner, so it's not just sitting there.

The price is...well, it's not low. The Xreal Aura starts at $1,279 with 12GB of memory and 256GB of storage, while bumping that to 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage will set you back $1,499. As for sizing, you can get them in two sizes: medium and large, both costing the same. Oh, and if you want to pre-order them, you need to put down a $199 priority deposit, with pre-orders actually opening later this month.

For comparison, Meta's recently unveiled Meta VR Glasses cost $1,299, while Samsung's Galaxy XR headset costs $1,799.

The Xreal Aura will be available "before the holidays" in the US, Canada, Japan, and South Korea. More markets are coming next year.

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