Surprise: The Google Xreal glasses debut at a Meta-beating $1,099

In this economy, how often does a product get less expensive before its debut? That just happened with the Google / Xreal Aura, the lightweight 95-gram glasses with a tethered Android XR compute puck and multiple virtual screens that just went on sale today. Xreal and Google have just announced the headset costs $1,099 through the end of the year, down from the $1,279 that Xreal was charging for early preorders last month.

I expect that’s because at $1,279, they were going head to head with Meta’s VR Glasses, and that’s tough competition for Google and Xreal’s new product. The Xreal Aura has one of the widest fields of view for transparent glasses yet at 70 degrees diagonal, but that’s still not huge and transparent glasses have other tradeoffs.