I ditched my laptop for a pocketable mini PC and a pair of AR glasses

I really liked the new Xreal glasses because of the built-in head tracking. But I was getting a lot of drift over time such that after anywhere between a few minutes and maybe half an hour, the center of the screen wouldn't be straight ahead anymore. Meaning I would need to reset the display location far too often. I ended up returning them because of it.

Waiting for the XReal One Pro to vibe code using Aider and Samsung DeX in a Termux terminal while walking my countries national parks (just something I would like to try)

Ditto. I bought them because I travel a lot for work and TVs at hotels are always a mess when it comes to HDMI in. I use them on maybe 1 of 4 flights I’m on (usually on SteamDeck with XR plug-in in Decky), and rarely at the hotels.

The only time they were really helpful for me was one flight when I had to work on some sensitive content and the person next to me was obviously trying to shoulder surf me.

Maybe it would be more productive if I had a newer iPhone with USB -C or the XReal One glasses. But having to use all the dongles to get to go from iPhone to lightning/HDMI adapter to HDMI to USB-C cable to original XReal Beam (which is way underpowered), to USB-C to glasses, that’s a ton of cables. And some forget, you’ve now got to pair your AirPods with the Beam! Ughh. It’s a little better with the Beam Pro. It’s faster and generally a good experience, but it’s still another device and still doesn’t have a good way to stream 3D content from Plex/NAS. Ugh.

That being said, when I put in the effort, the picture is very nice.

The Air 2 sadly went backwards in the clarity at the edges, which makes them harder to use for work.

I did this with nreal air glasses (now xreal air), specifically for coding. Most uses cases for these type of glasses is around media consumption, so I was taking a bit of a leap when doing it for coding/heavy text usage.

There are two modes. One is fixed so that the virtual monitor stays in one spot on the lenses. The single virtual monitor stays directly in front of you. The other is floating, which basically keeps the virtual monitor in one spot and you can turn your head to look away. This mode also lets you set up 3 virtual monitors side by side so you can turn to look at them. It uses head tracking to basically shift the image in the opposite direction you turn your head.

In both cases, the screen does move, and this is super relevant when looking at text and down at status bars. The fixed one is better because it moves relative to your head, but both cases have some amount of jitter. I found the best case coding scenario is the fixed monitor (no head tracking), and being in a seat wth head rest and you can press your head back into it. This minimizes your head movement, which minimizes how much the text moves about. The downside is that we're used to looking up and down at the screen, so you want to set the monitor at a proper distance so you can look up and down with just your eyes. You really want to shrink the monitor to a size close to that of a laptop.

I ultimately ended up not liking the experience very much. No matter what, you're gonna end up with some amount of text movement. There is also a bit of light saturation bleed through (old CRT style). Putting the blackout blinders on helps a lot, but the projected nature remains an issue. Essentially only usable long term in a recliner or a car seat with headrest. Unlike the author, I am using a work provided laptop and I have that with me anyways. There was coolness to leaving the laptop in my backpack and just bringing the glasses up via wire - but to actually do anything, I need a keyboard. Which means taking along a Lenovo's thinkpoint trackpad keyboard (really great backpack keyboard); or pulling out the laptop.

The newer ones, like Xreal One from the article might be a better experience. A coworker had the air 2 pros and used them for travel. He said he didn't really notice the things I did, so maybe it was a improved experience even with that version. But he mostly worked in office documents and only occasional terminal work. When traveling and using the glasses, it was almost all "office docs", and only for short periods of time. For me - I am going to wait and be a slow adopter to move to a new version.

If your monitor keeps following your head movements, even teeny tiny ones, it gets annoying very fast.

open source that requires a commercial license. and the drivers link to a repo that 404. think i will pass.

yea I tried the Viture and the headtracking was nowhere near where it needed to be. I really liked everything else about the Viture Pros. They were lighter than the Xreal ones, generated less heat, and had individual diopter adjustments on each lense.

Xreal One however has rock-solid head tracking. It does drift occasionally but it's very tolerable. I returned the Viture Pro and ketp the Xreal one.

There are people who can only lie flat on the bed and can't sit without support.

to use a laptop you need to be sitting up. when you are bedridden many times you can't do that. and even healthy, sitting in bed with my legs stretched out is uncomfortable for longer periods of time. not to mention most people would balk at their partner doing that when they share a bed. consider yourself lucky. but do check that you are giving enough attention to your partner otherwise. i have at least one friend who got divorced specifically because he was more interested in computers than his wife.

I've seen several laptops used like this. The only issue is that the WiFi antennas are (usuall?) in the screen.

It says that the battery is for when you want to move the PC between desks, so I'd imagine it only lasts for five minutes or so.

> Also, great pun with being blind and "excited looking at this".

I'm also blind and this is not a pun. No one blind I know would change their usage of language to avoid using vision verbs for the sake of underlining how blind they are.

The Tecno Pocket Go kickstarter seems to already be 4 months late and lots of complaints in the comments

Yeah, it's interesting because the focal distance in the Quest is a fixed ~5 ft, regardless of the apparent depth of the thing you're looking at in VR. This is a pretty comfortable spot for old eyes, so it can make things a little crisper compared to real life, at shorter and further apparent distances.

Though it comes with its own set of discomfort issues: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergence-accommodation_confl...

Do you wear both VR and regular glasses? I'm not sure the VR set can accommodate cylinder and astigmatism of my prescription lenses.

I don't know that the hardware is dead yet. They got a cash infusion last year and there are occasional hardware updates in their Discord. It's just a slow process with 1-2 engineers total working on the many different hardware and software and firmware elements of the overall product.

I have the Xreal Air and it's alright. Low resolution and a bit blurry text still. It's the nature of optics right now.

It's a single virtual display by default unless you run a fairly unstable piece of software. I use it mostly on plane flights.

It feels like the tech is almost close enough to really be useful but it's just not quite there yet. It's useful but not pleasant.

I've used my Air for coding work. I found that I couldn't stick with it in Dumb Screen mode. I have astigmatism and the lenses to correct it; and my impression is that the lenses slightly contract the usable FoV which means you need the head tracking to be able to look around the screen more. That means you need the virtual desktop code running on the host (or the dongle, which I don't have) and the OSes you can use are them restricted.

With that, though, it's fine. The main reason I don't spend as much time in them these days is that I'm spending a lot more of my time in video calls than coding and we've not socially normalised big black sunglasses on video calls yet.

I would not use this for coding, even with their high end glasses and corrected vision. I don't use all of the fancy 3D, VR features either. They just feel like gimmicks with buggy software for me.

If you keep that expectation and use it like an external dumb monitor, it is great.

Xreal lets you return devices for 30 days. You could try one basically for the cost of return shipping.

It’s pretty good on airplanes too

Same, while I use it for Beat Saber all the time, after testing virtual desktop and the new native desktop sharing, I quickly abandoned attempts to use it for work.

Not only because of the resolution, but also it’s tiring to have something strapped to your face, and it makes it hard to have a cup of coffee or a snack.

What software were you using, Virtual Desktop? I find it super clear in a Quest 3 and I often work for hours in it.

Didn't try Quest 3, but biggest disadvantages of quest 2 are:

- half a kilo hanging in front of your face

- working in the summer w/o air conditioning is a nightmare