Sometimes it feels like XR glasses are the next frontier when it comes to gaming accessories. And it makes sense, with the rise of handheld gaming PCs – at least before RAM prices started making them nigh unaffordable – these glasses are a great way to get something like the Steam Deck a bigger screen while you’re away from home.
So, it makes sense that Asus would team up with XReal to make a bespoke pair of gaming glasses, especially off the back of the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X. And when the glasses are plugged straight into a handheld, the ROG XReal R1 is awesome, with a clear picture and some nice RGB lighting. But, these glasses cost $849, and at least part of that goes to the dock, which allows you to connect multiple devices through HDMI and DisplayPort. That’s a cool concept, but it ends up being the worst part of the entire package.
Design and Features
Out of all the XR gaming glasses I’ve tried so far, none of them look especially good. Just due to the fact that there needs to be displays, mirrors and whatever else built into the glasses themselves, the format lends itself to bulky, garish designs. The ROG XReal R1s are no different.
The little hood that houses the displays measures about an inch thick, which naturally makes the glasses protrude a bit from your face. The outward-facing lenses, then, have this angular design that does look a bit more attractive than something like the Viture Beast, but not by much.
The ROG XReal R1 does hide the little camera that powers head tracking a bit better than most of its contemporaries, though. The entire front of the glasses is one piece of dark plastic, with a small section kind of boxed off in the center. The 3DoF sensor lies in that little boxed off section, and if I didn’t know that these kinds of glasses need a camera sensor to function, I wouldn’t have even guessed that it was there.
There are plenty of these kinds of glasses out there that try to at least maintain an air of professionalism. The Viture Beast, for example, prides itself as being great for productivity. But the temples of the ROG XReal R1 are about as ROG as you can get. In the middle of each temple are nine RGB lighting zones, arranged in little diagonal lines. By default they have the standard cycling rainbow effect we’ve all seen a million times, but you can change the lighting by messing with the settings.
Most of the time, you’ll do that through the buttons found on the left temple. On the bottom, you have a button that either centers the screen in your field of view, or opens the settings if you double tap it. Behind that button is what you’d expect to just be a volume rocker, but instead pressing it in either direction will bring up a little menu with which you can adjust things like tint, screen size, and, well, the volume.
The speakers are also in the temples, and they’re fine. They’re loud enough that you’ll be able to clearly hear the game you’re playing, but they’re not great at drowning out everything around. That’ll be fine for most people, but if you really want to get immersed in your game, or you just don’t want people around you to hear what you’re playing or watching, you should probably use some headphones.
I don’t think I’ve ever used a pair of XR glasses where the menu setup was intuitive, and the ROG XReal R1 follows that trend. After fiddling around with it for a couple of hours, everything did kind of click – but there’s a definite learning curve.
Everything changes once you plug the glasses into the dock though. The dock itself looks even more like a generic ROG accessory than the glasses do. It’s essentially a gemstone-shaped hunk of plastic with angular lines engraved into it. Shockingly, though, despite the need for dedicated power in the back of it, there is no RGB. The only lighting to speak of are indicator lights that tell you whether or not connected devices are on.
Above those lights are two triangular buttons and a little control stick. The button on the left is the power, and the triangle on the right turns on fps boost. This essentially lowers the resolution and ups the refresh rate from 120Hz to 240Hz. That sounds cool, but in practice it ended up with a glitchy picture where looking at text instantly gave me a headache.
The little control stick is how you’ll usually mess with the settings. There are shortcuts, where pushing to the right, for example, will switch the glasses between Anchor mode – where the display is held in one space – and Follow mode, where, you guessed it, the display follows you wherever you look. Most of these controls work fine, even though it is easier to use the buttons on the glasses. After all, when you’re using the glasses your vision is going to be a bit obscured, so it’s a bit awkward to try and look at what you’re doing down on your desk.
On the back of the dock, you’ll find two USB-C ports, one of which supplies power, along with two HDMI ports and a DisplayPort. Then, on the front is another USB-C port, which is meant for the glasses themselves.
However, the biggest problem with the dock was that when you push the stick upwards, it’s supposed to toggle between different visual profiles. That’s pretty standard for monitors these days, but for some reason, it simply didn’t work on the unit I reviewed. Even after updating the firmware and trying several different devices, the ROG XReal R1 was stuck on “Racing” mode the entire time I was reviewing it.
That mode didn’t necessarily look bad but, it’s always a bit of a red flag when a button just doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.
The dock being mediocre would be one thing if it was just an added accessory, but you can’t buy these glasses without it. And given that XReal and Asus are asking $849, when the XReal 1S is just $449 for a pretty similar experience, it does make you wonder how much extra you’re paying for the dock.
Performance and Gaming
By itself, the Asus ROG XReal R1 is a 1080p display with a 120Hz refresh rate that sits on your face. Asus and XReal talk a big game about the actual display too, claiming brightness of up to 700 nits, and that it’s 106% of the sRGB color gamut. I can’t actually test that, because the display is too small for a colorimeter. However, at its best, the display is quite colorful, though it is a little washed out and dim most of the time – but that might be the visual profile that the glasses were stuck on.
When the glasses are plugged into something like the Xbox Ally X, they’re pretty solid. Games look great, and XReal has done a lot of work to make text less of a pain to read. However, it’s important to keep in mind that this is still a 1080p display. You can stretch the display out to the equivalent of a 171-inch display, but when you do, the image can start to look a little pixel-y. The sweet spot, then, is having a smaller display in follow mode. That way, you can see the entire display without moving your head, and it’s not so blown up that you start to see the imperfections of the 1080p image.
I spent quite a bit of time laying in bed and replaying Final Fantasy XIII on the Lenovo Legion Go 2 with these glasses, and the game looked great – if a little dated. But one of the cool features on these glasses is an instant 3D mode. For some reason, that just wouldn’t work when plugged into the dock, but when plugged straight into the handheld it used the X1 chip built into the glasses to transform FFXIII into a 3D game.
That wasn’t perfect, obviously, but it kind of made it look like I was playing the game on a very large 3DS. But, because it was strapped to my face, rather than held awkwardly in front of me, the 3D effect didn’t immediately give me a headache as soon as I moved my head a little bit. I don’t know if I’d use the ‘Instant 3D’ mode all the time, but it is a cool little effect that adds, well, another dimension to whichever game you’re playing.
The big selling point of this ROG and XReal crossover, though, is plugging in a gaming PC or console and playing via the dock. After fighting with a firmware update, this worked fine enough. The display doesn’t change all that much when it’s plugged into the dock, so it was still a good 1080p image, just with the same weird text shimmer that all XR glasses have right now.
But as soon as I enabled the 240Hz mode, everything went downhill. Motion is smoother with this mode turned on, there’s no doubt about that, but pixels that aren’t supposed to be moving start wiggling around a little bit. There’s this strange shimmer to the glasses when the 240Hz mode is turned on that makes subtitles actually painful to read and makes the rest of the image look downright strange, like static elements of the scene are moving somehow.
This problem goes away as soon as you push the little triangle button to swap the refresh rate back to 120Hz. I’m not sure what’s causing the problem, or even if I’m just particularly sensitive to it, but I’ve used plenty of regular 240Hz monitors without seeing that weird behavior.
It’s just another point against the dock, though. Really, the benefit of the dock is just the ability to easily plug in a gaming PC or a PS5. That’s a neat feature, to be sure, and I loved playing a bit of Beast of Reincarnation on these glasses through my gaming PC. But that’s not worth twice the added cost over the $449 XReal 1S or the $549 Viture Beast.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
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