- Come on kids, let's get Nreal, Nreal?
Nreal.
N... Help.
- [Bell] You already made this joke.
- I know I did, in the Nreal-
(laughs)
(beep)
I know I did, in the Nreal Light video
that I did almost a year ago.
That was December.
This, I was waiting and in that video I said,
I'm you know what?
This one's okay, but I really want to try out the Nreal Air.
At that time I thought the Nreal Air was basically
just gonna be an upgraded version of the Light.
It's actually not, it's actually sort of like a side grade
or maybe even a downgrade in some areas,
but on the plus side,
you won't look like as much of a dork while wearing them.
Oh, that feels good.
What am I dealing with here?
This is, I open it like this.
Oh, okay.
Cleaning cloth, a manual.
This is not a toy for children.
No children.
If you think that I'm just about to unbox
a regular pair of sunglasses right now,
no, that's not right.
These are augmented reality glasses
although they can also do VR apparently.
- [David] Why did you say aougmented?
- Aougmented.
That's the proper German pronunciation.
- [David] Uh huh.
- Aougmented reality.
And yeah, I mean like a lot of companies
have been trying to do this kind of thing.
HoloLens is, obviously everyone knows about this,
but you know, now with Quest Pro
they have like a bit more, you know, it's a VR headset
but they're adding in more augmented reality stuff.
A lot of like smaller, lesser known companies
trying this stuff out.
Nreal seems to be one of the few companies
that is trying to make commercially available products
that don't look like full on developer prototypes.
This one, if you forget about the fact
that there's these like dinky little things behind
the front glass, you might be tricked into thinking
that's just a regular pair of sunglasses.
I can't see anything
because I think there's a film on the lens first of all.
But second of all, how do I look?
- [Bell] Very weird.
(laughing)
It's like you have fake eyes behind the glasses.
- Very weird.
So I mean, you know, in terms of general design
it's very similar to the Light.
It's just that the front lens portion is,
you know a lot more like that standard Wayfair design.
But in terms of the thick module here
and the angled lenses here,
it is very similar to the Light.
You can adjust the angle of the arm
because when I'm putting it on, I feel like it's,
when it rests on my ears, it's a little too much.
Like, can you see that?
- [David] Yah.
- Like it, I feel like it wants to be here,
but my ears are here.
- [David] Screw your ears, dude.
- And this ear is even lower than this ear.
- [David] What the heck is wrong with you?
- What can Nreal do about that?
This is a US, I'm guessing it's USB-C,
USB-C to C cable with an angled section
because that's gonna plug into the end of the glasses there.
It looks like there's other things in here.
Okay, so I think this is the prescription lens.
If you wanna wear these in public for some reason,
shade, throwing shade,
you can take these to like an optometrist
and get prescription lens cut for them, apparently.
- [Bell] Please wear those.
- They won't stay unless I do this.
- [David] It's for librarian.
- You've found my secretly lair, hero character.
The metaverse is amazing.
And you got different nose adapters and then a shade,
I guess a cover for the lenses.
I feel like that should go on easier
but I have to like squish it on a little bit.
All right.
One thing to notice right off the bat
is that this does not have an internal battery.
They say that it can go, I didn't realize this
until I was looking on the site because the site says,
up to five hours streaming in Air Casting mode.
And I'm like, okay, it's got a five hour battery life.
And then you scroll down and at the very bottom it says,
using fully charged 4,000 milliamp our phone.
And I'm like, wait, what?
Cause this does not have an internal battery.
It's fully dependent on your phone, which is you know
we'll get into this,
the possibilities with AR devices, but like, you know
there's a reason the HoloLens is so freaking bulky.
Although I don't know, I'm not making them,
maybe Elon Musk will fix it.
He's got nice batteries.
Okay, external.
So obviously we got the USB-C port here
that is going to plug into your phone
through the cable provided.
It looks like we got speakers here.
So they do have two open ear speakers
is what they call them.
Bass boost, virtual rendering, echo noise cancellation.
I'm guessing that's for the microphones
because there are two microphones as well, somewhere.
There's maybe one microphone there
and the other microphone is right there
on the top of the right arm.
Both microphones on the right side,
which I guess would make sense
if they just wanted to have all the micro circuitry
like on this one side.
But what's on this side then?
Nothing.
Volume rocker here.
I'm guessing this is a power button
and looks like that's all the IO or buttons that we have.
Let's start using it.
Let's get into the, let's get into the verse, apostrophe.
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All right, it's time to enter the non-branded metaverse.
As I said, we have to jack in for that.
- [David] The line is, we need to jack-in and jack-off.
- Wait, no.
Okay, one thing right off the bat that is not great
compared to the Light is the fact
that there's no clip over here.
Like I guess they're saying that this goes down right away
so it can go down from here onto your phone
but I guess these aren't falling off anytime soon
so that's all right.
Okay, I'll give you a pass on that Nreal.
Let's plug it in.
Nebula is Nreals like Google Play Store or like,
it's the software that runs here.
It's like when you put on your Quest.
Sometimes you set it to Canada and it's like, oh,
we can't do that in Canada.
Canada isn't on here.
Date of birth, do I need to put that in?
Okay, AR space, take me home.
Is that this is supposed to be,
do I need to turn them on or something?
- [David] Is the world 3-D yet?
- Hey, there we go.
Oh, I can't see it.
Oh, it's updating.
After it updates, I should be able to see fine.
- [David] It should fix your eyes by then.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So while the glasses are being updated,
one thing I figured out while reading the booklet
is that those that cover,
this is not for style, this is so you can cover
the exterior lenses and like be more immersed in VR.
So like to block out the outside world.
And the other thing is, is that this is not a volume rocker
it's a brightness control.
Also, while I'm waiting, I figured this out.
So I thought there was a way to adjust, but I don't
I never wanna force things with tech products.
You never, you never wanna just push it
until it something clicks.
But that's exactly what you're supposed to do here.
So you can adjust the angle by just-
(clicking)
Just doing that.
- [David] Ah.
- It doesn't, yeah it makes me a little uncomfortable,
but that's the norm.
Let's go to Pandora, baby.
(imitating machinery)
Ah!
I should have expected this
because this was basically the experience
with the Nreal Light as well.
But a lot of stuff was really janky.
So, oh, the phone crashed.
(car crashing)
I expected this to be a little smoothed out, honestly,
I'm a little disappointed.
We've got lowered specs in a number of areas.
It's only got three degrees of freedom
compared to six degrees of freedom in the Light.
So you're not gonna be able to like move around
and have it track you in 3-D space.
It will be able to tell where you're looking
and the display will track
and if you're in a VR experience,
it's like your station, it's like a stationary VR experience
instead of a room scale.
It doesn't have hand tracking.
The other one didn't have hand tracking
but the other one did have-
- [Bell] The other one did have hand tracking.
- It did?
(clapping)
Editor, just put this in there a little bit.
Just kidding, it did have hand tracking.
There's no hand tracking on this as well
because there's there's no external sensors
other than the proximity sensor here to tell
when your head goes in.
The Nreal Light did have hand tracking
and you could either use your phone as a remote
or kind of like, I think you could pinch, I forget,
play the clip.
Oh, oh, okay.
This is where we crashed last time
and it didn't do this before so this is good.
Good, okay.
Ah, updating again!
Something's happening.
It's happening, it's working!
Your Nreal glasses are activated.
Oh.
(laughing)
I was looking over here and I heard something
but I didn't see anything
and you're like, it looks like there's something on
and I'm like, what?
And I looked over here and there's the screen
cause it thinks I'm-
All right.
Your phone is your controller is what it says.
Try and move your phone around.
There it is.
So it says it's supposed to do
head tracking or body tracking.
It's only 3-D-
I guess maybe it like tries its best.
For a more stable experience in vehicles
we have enhanced the anti shake effect of this mode.
You can disable in the settings page.
You can see that I don't, I mean you guys can't see
but on my screen you can see the little screen recording.
Oh, there's a time limit again!
It can only record like 20 seconds.
Okay, so what you're seeing right now
is, I guess you must only be seeing the Nebula screen
and not the real world behind it
cause there's no cameras here.
On the other one you could see,
like they won't be able to see you guys.
- [David] No.
- Right, there's no cameras here?
- [David] No.
- So that's too bad thing number one.
The other too bad thing
is the fact that the FOV in this,
is smaller than in the Light.
This is 46 and it used to be, it's 52 in the Light.
And so when I move my head around
like I can only see this very tiny thing
and there's so much space around the available screen.
Vertically, it's not too much of an issue.
Actually well it is.
(David laughing)
But it's not as much as an issue to me
as the left and right motion.
Over here I can see one, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight, eight rows
and then there's like another eight rows here
and then another over here.
I will say that like in the Light
I'm impressed by the resolution here,
like things look sharp and that's really cool.
All right, so since we didn't have time
to go to the optometrist and get my prescription lenses
that I totally will do after this.
We just taped my glasses
and put a little bit of tape on the proximity sensor
cause it kept going away.
So now we're set up.
Now we're ready.
Okay, I could live like this.
Did I say it's got a 3840 by 1080 resolution per eye?
Which is pretty good.
That rocker that I pointed out as a volume rocker falsely
is the brightness control.
So in order to control the volume,
you have to use the phone volume I believe.
Yeah, yeah, here we go.
Come on.
Nope, it stopped.
See this is funny.
The widest full screen you can do here,
is still limited by the field of view.
So the actual screen that I see is only this big
instead of like, this could fill
my entire field of view and it's this big.
(clapping)
You know.
(crab rave playing)
I mean, they're not great speakers but I think they are,
I think they're quite a bit better
than the ones in the Light, maybe I'm tripping.
I'll accept it.
Based on what I've tried so far,
this seems very similar to Light
in terms of the like default Nebula experience.
You know, I haven't done one of their experiences.
You're about to enter a third party application.
So what I was saying, it's pretty janky.
I'm sure that if you used this for a long time
you could probably get used to it.
There were ways, like there's a browser,
there's Google, Wikipedia, YouTube.
You're not just limited to the phone.
There also are experiences that you can use
controllers with.
The headset I guess through a PC and use SteamVR.
So one of the things that I wanted to try real quick
before we end is SteamVR.
Let's go.
Cause I'm not an AR mode anymore.
Whoa, do I look cool guys?
- [David] Yah.
- Well after trying to figure out
how to do the SteamVR situation for a while there,
we figured out that you actually,
the only way that it streams VR games
is using Invidia's Cloud XR streaming over wifi technology.
And once we figured out that we had to like install things
and set things up and do that whole thing
we were like, all right, you know what?
This is actually probably not worth it
based on the low FOV
cause I can only like, I'm gonna play a VR game
but all I can see is just a square in front of me.
There are some people who say they enjoy it
but I'm also finding a number of Reddit posts
talking about how it's not good because the FOV is so small,
but for like other augmented reality experiences,
maybe it might be worth it.
The option is there if you really wanna make it work
but it's probably not gonna be the best experience
in the world.
Okay, so this was a bit of a learning experience
primarily because I'm just confused about
what Nreal is trying to do here.
On the one hand they launched the Nreal Light
and that kind of seemed like,
all right we're gonna build this platform
based on these six degrees of freedom AR headset
with AR headsets with a lot of cool features,
high resolution and we're gonna build out an app ecosystem.
And work as well was another big selling point
was the fact that you could, like there's browsers in there
you can connect it to your computer
and have like a virtual office set up.
But instead of kind of releasing a new version of the Light
that had more features, they released this
the Nreal Air that is cut down in a lot of ways.
It's got a smaller field of view,
it can only do three DOF tracking instead of six DOF
which leaves one of the only real benefits
to the Air over the Light being the fact that
it looks a little more like regular sunglasses,
which is definitely improvement, like an improvement.
Like if we're going to have AR glasses
get anywhere close to the mainstream,
they can't look like you are a cyborg
and you have a giant frigging thing on your face.
You know, they have to look like regular sunglasses.
That's one of the only things going for the Nreal Air
other than the fact that it's cheaper.
It's launching a 379 USD instead of $599,
that which is what the Light launched at.
Their whole website, like the product page for the Air
is just covered in people look like they're models
just kinda like looking cool
and like, oh, putting the case in my purse.
You know, there is a positive side here
which is that if you are into AR
and you wanna tinker and you like early adopting things,
you can get this and play around.
It's just disappointing because the people who would do that
would probably pay the $599 for the Light
instead of paying $379.
I'm confused by companies like Nreal, what are you-
Who are you?
Nreal, no matter who you are,
thanks for making new, weird things.
I appreciate that, you know.
We need people like that.
I just wish that once the products actually arrived here
on the ShortCircuit set, I wouldn't have a short circuit,
try and understand what's going on in my brain.
You know what I mean?
Thanks for watching.
Subscribe to ShortCircuit for more videos like this
and if you, Hey,
if you're looking for something to watch,
watch the Nreal Light video.
I think I had a better time in that one.
No offense.
(laughing)