The XR area at CES was not as big as it was last year, but it was still spread out over several venues and invitation-only hotel suites, making it impossible to see everything, even if you walk thirty miles in five days as I did.
A surprising number of companies, including stalwart HTC Vive, were absent, and fewer new players seems to be arriving on the scene. Consolidation and attrition are culling the herd as funding is flow to AI ventures. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the XR at CES is how unsurprising it is now. Immersive technologies have gone from being a potentially disruptive new thing to a CES staple.
The biggest star of the XR area, The Apple Vision Pro, wasn’t at CES, nor were Meta, Microsoft, Magic Leap, Rokid, Third Eye, or Lynx. Some of this is surprising, some not. Meta and Microsoft have their own developer conferences. Rokid just raised $70M. Perhaps they were busy doing other things. Pimax and Varjo were there, focused on prosumers and enterprise, where they are primarily used for training and simulation. HTC Vive, whose Elite headset is among the best in PCVR, was absent for the first time in ten years. Company execs Pearly Chen and Alvin Graylin were on panels at Digital Hollywood, but neither would comment on their company’s absence. There were also several companies, like RealWear, that were only doing private demos in hotel suites.
Sony introduced its as-yet unnamed spatial content creation system, set for a 2024 launch. The headset, which will first be used exclusively by Siemens, looks a bit like the open-sided Quest Pro, but its visor flips up like the HoloLens 2. The system features a 4K OLED XR head-mounted display, a half dozen sensors and cameras, a ring controller, and a pointer, all powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon® XR2+ chip set. No word on the price or street date. Sony has a mega-booth at the edge of the Las Vegas Convention Center’s Central hall. Reviewers lucky enough to be invited into the inner sanctum report the as-yet unnamed headset a serious competitor to the Vision Pro for enterprise applications.
Xreal’s New Ultra 6 DOF AR HMD Builds Momentum.We’ve been following XReal’s story since its founder and CEO, former Magic Leap engineer Chi Xu, boldly announced a $1,000 spatial computing device that took a lot of what was right, and wrong, about the Magic Leap, and made it better, igniting a nasty lawsuit that only went away when Magic Leap suffered major setbacks, layoffs, reorganization, a new CEO, and renewed focus on enterprise applications. Xreal offload batteries and compute onto the smartphone, then jamming these hard-to-miniaturize components in the wings of the glasses, and therefore enjoyed a great reduction in price. The only problem was the Nreal Light and its Nebula spatial computing operating system was kind of janky. So much so that it often failed even in company demos. Unsurprisingly, sales were disappointing.
Then Chi did something bold. He seemingly jettisoned spatial computing. Instead, he renamed the company Xreal, and made projector glasses that merely mirrored the screen of the smartphone, which we call assisted reality. It is not augmented reality as it does not offer a composite view of the physical and digital, but imagines smart glasses as a mobile phone accessory, not the main event. Xreal sold 300,000 of its Air and Air2 glasses. It saved the company.
Chi is not giving up on spatial computing. At CES, they introduced next generation of the Xreal Air 2 smart glasses are called Ultra (for now) re-introduces spatial computing glasses, but it’s based on the Air2, which keeps the cost down ($699). Tech writers have been going bonkers about it all week. It is remarkable low-cost, 6 DOF headset, but it’s tethered awkwardly to the smartphone. The company says there is no bluetooth solution to the power needs of the headset.
As if taking a victory lap, Xreal had a booth that dominated the XR area in the Central Hall at LVCC. The Air is also being used by Sightful in their monitorless Spacetop laptop, and a new initiative with BMW to imagine the impact of spatial computing on the passenger experience.
My demo of the Xreal Air2 Ultra was flat out impressive (specs). There are screens and 3D objects all around you, mixed with reality, floating in your room. The 52-degree field of view takes a little getting used to, but screens are anchored in place as they would in the physical world. The glasses weigh in at an impressive 80 grams. The addition of a three position temple adjustment and extra nose pieces ensure the right fit. The stylish titainium rims ensures that style hides the frame’s slightly too large look.
Click for part 2 of this story: XR at CES 2024, Part Two and my other CES 2024 stories. AR Helping the Blind to See at CES 2024, and My Visit to the K-Metaverse.
