Viture Pro XR Glasses Review (2024)

While video-centric smart glasses aren't true mixed reality (XR) devices like the Apple Vision Pro, they're useful in their own way, making it feel like you're looking at a huge screen. The Viture Pro XR glasses are an upgraded version of the $549 Viture One, with a wider field of view, a much brighter picture, and a lower starting price of $459.99. Just keep your expectations in check when it comes to their augmented (AR) and mixed reality capabilities, since their field of view isn't wide enough to make such effects feel natural. Still, the Viture Pro XR smart glasses cost much less than headsets like the $3,500 Vision Pro, earning our Editors' Choice award for their affordability and excellent display quality.

Design and Features: Highly Adjustable

The Pro XR glasses are almost identical to the preceding Viture One, except for a few small accents. The tiny Viture logo on the upper right corner of the frame is now a metallic orange, while the hinges are black to match the frame and temples (both elements are silver on the One).

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The button and speaker layout remains the same. A brightness rocker and outward lens-dimming button sit on the underside of the left temple, while the magnetic connection for the USB cable is on the end of the right temple. Both temples have speaker grilles and microphone slots on their upper and lower edges, respectively.

My favorite feature from the One, and the one I wish was standard on all AR smart glasses, carries over to the Pro XR: focus dials. Two small wheels on the top of the frames let you adjust the focus for each eye. I’m nearsighted, and for nearly every other head-mounted display I’ve used except the $439 Rokid Max, I've had to turn to costly prescription lens inserts to get a clear picture. The wheels allow for myopia adjustments up to -5.00D, so I could easily make the glasses look crisp to my eyes. The Rokid Max glasses offer a wider adjustment range up to -6.00D, so they might be a better fit if your prescription is particularly strong.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

With angled prisms that are clearly visible through the front lenses, it's easy to identify the Pro XR as smart glasses despite their resemblance to sunglasses. You can almost eliminate these identifying features by pressing the lens-dimming button on the left temple. Doing so hides almost all of the components you would otherwise see through the lenses. Of course, this doesn't eliminate the wire that runs from the right temple, so eagle-eyed passersby will still be able to figure out what you’re wearing.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Speaking of, the included cable connects fairly securely to a magnetic port on the glasses. A rubber sleeve (also included) fits over the connector to prevent hair from getting caught between them. The wire terminates in a USB-C plug, which is how the Pro XR gets power and a picture. A zip-up case and lens cloth are also in the box.

Compatibility: Works With Computers, Phones, and Consoles (Mostly)

Any device with DisplayPort-over-USB-C functionality will work with the Pro XR seamlessly: Just plug in and the glasses will light up like an external monitor. That covers most modern laptops, gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck, the iPhone 15 series, and many Android phones. Note that Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones lack the DisplayPort-over-USB-C option, so they aren't compatible.

Viture One Neckband and Pro Mobile Dock (Credit: Will Greenwald)

Viture offers a few optional accessories if you want to use the glasses with unsupported devices. A $129 mobile dock lets the Pro XR (and the regular Viture One) work with the Nintendo Switch and enables 3D video from other devices that support it. It also provides up to eight extra hours of battery life to the system (the glasses drain the battery of whatever device you plug them into). A $99 HDMI adapter is available for iPhones with Lightning connectors, but you need to pair it with Apple's $49 Lightning to Digital AV Adapter.

There’s also a $199 Android-powered neckband system that connects to the Pro XR via a short cable to make the glasses work as a standalone device.

A Wider, Brighter Picture

The Pro XR's 46-degree field of view is quite generous for the category and wider than that of the Viture One (43 degrees). The glasses show the equivalent of a 135-inch screen at a distance of 9.8 feet away, which makes for a big, easy-to-read picture. The 1080p resolution is sharp enough that I can easily type this review using them. The experience is similar to simply staring at a decently sized monitor.

This is the best view we can show without actually looking through the glasses (Credit: Will Greenwald)

The biggest advantage of the Pro XR glasses over the Viture One is light output. Viture says it raised the perceived brightness from 500 nits to 1,000 nits, which puts the glasses in line with the levels required to adequately view lots of high dynamic range (HDR) content. For comparison, the Rokid Max glasses go up to just 600 nits. I can't directly measure this claim like I can with monitors and TVs because of how small the projected image is, but I can safely say that the picture looks significantly brighter than in those other glasses just by eyeballing it.

In fact, I’ve tested enough TVs of varying brightness that I can at least spitball that the picture I see through the Pro XR is visually close to panels that put out around 1,000 nits. Contrast is very high and black levels look quite dark, especially once you darken the outside lenses to block incoming light.

Color performance is also strong. The glasses’ color range is very wide, comparable with the Nintendo Switch OLED and many TVs that can cover a generous amount of the DCI-P3 digital cinema space. Again, I can’t directly measure the color levels, but they appear vivid and balanced.

The refresh rate also doubles from the One, jumping to 120Hz. If you have a gaming device that supports that frame rate, it should make games look more fluid. That’s a strong “if,” of course; the Nintendo Switch can't push 120 frames per second, but a connected PC-like device like a Steam Deck can take advantage of it for at least some games.

Not Quite Mixed Reality

By default, the Viture Pro XR displays a stationary screen that stays locked in front of your eyes. This mode doesn’t use the glasses’ built-in three-degrees-of-freedom (3DOF) motion sensors since it doesn’t track your head movement. To take advantage of the sensors, which can tell the tilt and orientation of your head (but not its physical position like six-degrees-of-freedom (6DOF) sensors can), you need to perform a few extra steps.

Viture offers the free SpaceWalker app for Android and macOS (but not iOS or Windows), which lets you set up one or more virtual screens you can look between by moving your head. The Android version presents a dedicated interface for navigating through different apps and managing multiple screens. The macOS version simply offers a variety of options for virtual monitors, including a single ultra-wide screen, double or triple side-by-side monitors, and even a “coder view” that presents a monitor in landscape orientation in the center with vertical screens on either side.

Your options for iOS and Windows devices are more limited. If you have an iPhone, you can get the optional $79 USB-C XR Charging Adapter to provide a virtual display that stays in place relative to how you move your head and enables 180- and 360-degree video, spatial video, and 3D video. The adapter also adds this feature to any device capable of DisplayPort over USB-C, without SpaceWalker. If you have an older iPhone, you can get the same effect with the $99 HDMI adapter and Apple’s first-party Lightning AV Digital Adapter. If you have a Steam Deck, you can enable XR gaming through a fairly elaborate workaround using the Decky plugin loader and an XR plugin.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

SpaceWalker works well enough on the devices it’s available on, but I used the simple static mirrored display on the Pro XR the majority of the time. Perhaps the almost-complete fields of view of full-on XR headsets like the Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro have spoiled me, but keeping a virtual screen aligned with my view in the Pro XR’s 46-degree field of view felt more awkward than useful. With the display fixed in front of me, the picture always takes up the full display space of the glasses. Meanwhile, the edge of the glasses’ active display would cut off any screen in a virtual space with motion tracking whenever I moved my head.

It became a chore to keep entire screens in front of my eyes because they would vanish once they slid away from the (admittedly fairly generous) rectangle the glasses project onto. Since the glasses use 3DOF tracking and not 6DOF tracking, the actual position of these virtual screens was always at a fixed distance from my head and wouldn’t let me move closer or farther away relative to them. This made for a less seamless experience compared with the Meta Quest and Vision Pro or a simple display locked right in front of my face. This is a typical problem for AR video glasses because their fields of view are narrower than XR headsets.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Verdict: A Top Pick for Personal Displays

Although video glasses don't fully nail the mixed reality experience, they can still offer a big personal screen for work and entertainment. The Viture Pro XR glasses offer better picture quality than their predecessors for less money, while retaining the same feel and helpful set of focus dials that save you from spending on prescription lens inserts. Sure, they aren't nearly as functional as the Apple Vision Pro, but they also come in at less than a seventh of the price. If you're simply looking for a pair of smart glasses that replicate the experience of looking at a large monitor, the Viture Pro XR are among the best we've tested, earning our Editors' Choice award.