Two years ago, at CES 2023, I looked into my augmented reality crystal ball and predicted that it wouldn’t be long before we were talking about “glassholes” all over again. CES 2025 was inundated with AR glasses, and you couldn’t walk five feet without finding another booth begging you to slip a pair over your eyes. The glasses’ displays are looking better than ever. The controls are feeling tighter. And yet, they’re not there yet, not by miles. The best glasses we used were merely screen replacements.
Companies like Chamelo trotted out smart glasses with color-changing lenses. Beyond those, there were hordes of of glasses that function as wearable cameras, essentially equivalent to the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses that have become increasingly popular these last two years. These weren’t all small companies, either. Alongside new handhelds, Lenovo debuted a revised pair of glasses, the $400 Legion Glasses 2. They are an update to the company’s similar, tethered glasses from 2023 with far better screen clarity and brightness. You have to position them on your face just right, but they offer great-looking micro-OLED displays and loud, clear audio.
Those glasses were made for handhelds, though they’re still ancillary to the mobile gaming experience. Similarly, AR glasses maker XReal trotted out its $500 XReal One and $600 XReal One Pro. These glasses tether to your phone or computer to create a secondary screen. They include a switch to cement the image in place or have it follow your head where you look. Even better, they offer ultrawide screen view when tethered to a PC, so you can get that Apple Vision Pro ultrawide Mac mirroring experience at a fraction of the price. They were our favorite glasses of the convention, and they earned a spot on our best of show list.
The Functional AR Glasses of CES 2025 Were Full of Blazing Green Text
As our readers were keen to point out, XReal’s latest doesn’t fit the mold of “augmented reality” or even “extended reality.” It’s a hard thing to hear, but all those glasses with any true XR bent were merely prototypes. In the two years since I wrote my original AR CES article, these glasses are still trying to fix the same issues.
Take TCL’s RayNeo brand. The company slipped its RayNeo X3 Pro around my eyes and tried to get them to translate text from Mandarin to English. It worked, at least most of the time. With too much clamor around us, the glasses struggled to interpret language accurately or hear our commands. Even then, the translation was slow and cumbersome, and it certainly didn’t look or feel like a fully finished product. The glasses have touch controls on the right-side arm that worked—mostly. As with other glasses, they require you to position them on your nose precisely to see the wall of green, beta text spelling out its AI-connected software. These were all similar issues I experienced with the company’s prototype glasses from two years ago.
At least the RayNeo glasses were using Waveguide displays instead of projection, like on the XReal glasses. The company also mentioned its glasses include two sensors for image recognition and hand tracking, but I didn’t get to demo any of those capabilities. Fellow glasses brand Rokid also had a pair of glasses that showed off app lists you could view on the glasses with some hand controls, but you still only see green text displayed on your AR environment.
That was a routine issue I experienced with other brands’ products. I slapped the LAWK One glasses with their wraparound shades around my noggin, and I immediately felt like the kind of asshole who owns multiple jet skis and wants everyone to know they do. The glasses are made for the sporting users who want to start race timers in AR. Could it start a timer? Yes, but then you have ugly green text clogging up your field of view. LAWK also claims its new View glasses could stream live on TikTok, but I didn’t get to try any of that functionality. Those are more of a Meta Ray-Ban-style glasses without a screen.
So Far, Nobody Has Cracked the All the Issues With AR Glasses
Based on what I experienced, any real “augmented reality” glasses didn’t feel like a full product, even though I wore similar designs at CES two years ago. Just like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, I have a hard time trusting AI models with all but the simplest queries, and without on-device processing, they will still rely on external devices for anything you would actually want to use them for.
Meta is one of the few companies to show us the possibilities of true AR glasses, though we still don’t know when or if they’ll become a product you can buy. The company’s Orion project uses a pair of AR glasses, a wristband for motion controls, and a processing puck that sits in your pocket. Rumors hint Samsung may release its own pair of smart glasses this year with some more AI vision functionality, though based on those hints it certainly can’t be a phone replacement, at least not yet.
I’m bullish on AR glasses. They have an appeal far beyond bulky and heavy VR headsets. XReal’s landmark AR glasses from last year were the $700 Air 2 Ultra, which also featured some hand tracking and AR capabilities. They were limited when I tried them last year with a prototype UI. Developing an untethered UI is hard. The Spacetop G1 laptop from 2024 uses those same XReal glasses instead of a traditional screen, but it runs on an OS based on Android without the full functionality of a Windows PC or Mac. They’re a developer haven, but not exactly the kind of device any Joe Schmo would reach for first.
We’re still in the prototype phase for AR, but companies think there is a market for these devices now. Nobody but developers and self-proclaimed futurists will find most of these AR glasses useful in day-to-day life. But if you’re on a cheap red-eye flight without a TV built into the backrest, these light, tethered, secondary screen glasses might prove a good way to watch a movie without the bulk of a laptop or—worse—a massive Apple Vision Pro headset.