XREAL says AURA has passed 10,000 global reservations. It is the first pair of AR glasses running Android XR, Google's operating system for this category, and it launches sometime in the autumn.
The number needs its footnotes, and XREAL supplies most of them. The reservations are refundable. The initial $99 offer that carried a $199 launch credit has sold out, and $199 refundable deposits are still open. There is no final price. The company has committed only to a ceiling, saying AURA will not exceed $1,500 excluding applicable taxes, and it says pricing and availability details are weeks away. Ten thousand refundable deposits against a price nobody has seen is a measure of curiosity more than of demand.
The hardware is the reason the curiosity is warranted. AURA uses birdbath optics, the same approach as every XREAL product so far, for a 70 degree field of view at under 95 grams on the head. The weight works because the compute is not on your face: a pocketable unit tethers to the glasses by cable, carrying Qualcomm's Snapdragon Reality Elite for XR and AI work alongside XREAL's own X1S spatial coprocessor for the display and sensors.
What separates AURA from the company's earlier glasses is what it does with that. XREAL's previous birdbath products mostly put a virtual screen in front of you and played traditional content on it. AURA supports six degrees of freedom tracking, which means it knows where your head is in a room rather than only which way it is pointing, plus hand tracking and multimodal AI. Running Android XR gives it the Play Store and existing Android apps as well as XR titles.
That combination is what Google, Samsung and Apple are all building toward, and XREAL is shipping a version of it first. It is also the smallest company in that list by a wide margin, and the one whose glasses need a cable to a box in your pocket.
Road to VR reported the milestone. The $1,500 is a ceiling, not a price.