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Image Credit: XREAL
From day one, Google has always chased the competition — not to copy-paste their products with a few alterations, but to outdo them. This time around, it's teaming up with XREAL to build a new kind of AR glasses. And from what we’ve seen so far, they’re shaping up to be exactly what the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses should’ve been from the start.
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XREAL teams up with Google for "Project Aura" XR glasses
Today, XREAL, known for creating "lightweight AR glasses and spatial computing platforms," announced Project Aura at the Google I/O 2025 developer conference. Project Aura refers to the company’s "next-generation XR (extended reality) device," and is essentially XREAL’s upcoming optical see-through (OST) AR device.
This device is built on Android XR, Google’s software platform for mixed reality (AR/VR) headsets and smart glasses, which the company announced back in December 2024. Samsung was the first to officially announce a device using the Android XR platform, Project Moohan, which is expected to debut later this year. XREAL describes the Aura glasses as "lightweight and tethered," and they’ll supposedly "bring a large field-of-view experience."
Image Credit: XREAL
And to no one’s surprise, they’ll be powered by Google’s AI assistant, Gemini. Google’s been working on the concept of smart glasses for over a decade now, and pairing XREAL’s hardware with Gemini means you’ll be able to carry the AI assistant with you everywhere, without needing to so much as pick up a device.
Project Aura is built in collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies and will use Snapdragon XR chipsets optimized for spatial computing. Ziad Ashghar, the Senior Vice President and General Manager of XR at Qualcomm Technologies, says Snapdragon and XREAL’s collaboration will allow "amazing immersive experiences to come to life in a unique optical see-through product."
Don’t confuse these with Google’s own Android XR glasses, which the company showcased publicly at a TED conference earlier in April or, Project Astra, which is the AI assistant Google announced during last year’s I/O.
Though XREAL and Google announced Project Aura today, they went fairly light on the details. The company says it’ll share more at the Augmented World Expo (AWE) in June 2025 and later this year.
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