Xreal opens Aura pre-orders at $1,279, $20 below Meta's VR Glasses

Xreal opened pre-orders for the Aura, transparent Android XR glasses from Google and Xreal, starting at $1,279, The Verge reported on 7 October. The Verge said that price is $20 less than Meta's VR Glasses. The $1,279 model has 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, and a 16GB / 512GB configuration costs $1,499.

Both the Aura and Meta's VR Glasses overlay virtual objects and desktops on the real world, The Verge reported. Both are relatively lightweight because their Qualcomm Snapdragon Reality Elite chips and batteries sit in a separate compute puck, which runs either Meta's Horizon OS or Android XR. The Aura uses transparent lenses with a 70-degree diagonal field of view, which The Verge described as one of the largest yet for transparent glasses but smaller than Meta's passthrough view.

The Meta VR Glasses have eye tracking, so users select items by looking at them and pinching their fingers, The Verge reported. The Aura has a touchpad on its compute puck and hand-tracking that gives users virtual laser pointers. Both connect to other peripherals and accept USB-C DisplayPort video input, according to The Verge.

The Verge reported that only people who already made a reservation can pre-order, and that only the first 2,000 "Founder's Edition" pairs are necessarily coming at launch. Xreal CEO and co-founder Chi Xu said those pairs will ship this year. Xreal's press release said the glasses "will begin shipping soon" and that the launch is "now just weeks away"; The Verge reported orders will open to the general public in the coming weeks.

The glasses will ship only in the US, Canada, Japan and South Korea at first, before expanding to other regions in 2027, according to The Verge. Meta's VR Glasses are not due until spring 2027. The Verge reported it has not tested Android XR extensively, and that Samsung and Google shipped the $1,799 Galaxy XR with Android XR last year without sending a review unit.