Asus and Xreal’s $849 Gaming Display Glasses Are Available for Preorder

There are a lot of smart glasses right now, including a lot of display glasses, which work specifically like plug-in monitors for your face. Xreal makes a number of them. A new set made along with Asus, the ROG Xreal R1, is arriving starting in June. They have a better refresh rate than any other display glasses I’ve seen, but they’re also a lot more expensive for the privilege.

I tried the ROG Xreal R1 back in January, and while they definitely have a different glowing “gamer” design, they’re very much a subtly upgraded pair of Xreal One Pro glasses with an included console-switching dock. The ROG Xreal R1’s biggest unique feature is a 240Hz refresh rate micro-OLED display, which beats most other glasses that currently have a refresh rate of 120Hz. 

In order to make that refresh rate work, though, you’ll need to have the glasses plugged into the ROG Control Dock, which has two HDMI 2 ports and DisplayPort 1.4. The dock can be used to switch between a PC and multiple game consoles while wearing the glasses, in case you feel you need that.

My current favorite display glasses, Viture Beast, have a better resolution (1,920 by 1,200) compared to these ROG glasses (1,920 by 1,080) and are brighter than these glasses, which only go up to 700 nits. And they cost less ($549), although they don’t come with a console-switching dock. Xreal’s One Pro glasses are $599 and are practically the same in many ways, meaning that dock costs $250. The ROG R1 glasses have similar Bose-powered sound, the ability to pin a virtual monitor in place while moving your head and dimming electrochromic lenses, plus the flatter, more antiglare inner lenses of the One Pros.

I’d prefer if the ROG Xreal R1 had a better resolution or even a larger field of view. (This one’s 57 degrees, just like the Xreal One Pro.) Better glasses are coming: Xreal’s own Project Aura, technically part of a mixed reality computer package made with Google coming later this year, has a 70 degree field of view (at an unknown price).

In this economy, the whole thing’s a hard sell, to say the least. But if you’ve dreamed of 240Hz display glasses, these are those.