VITURE Pro XR Glasses Review – Cool, but Why?

These stylish shades do a lot more than block sunlight, in fact these are essentially dual 1080p 120Hz Sony Micro OLED displays built inside a set of electrochromic Ray-Ban style sunglasses. There’s a lot to unpack there, so let’s get into it, starting with a look around them. These VITURE Pro XR glasses have a pretty sleek style, as I said it’s a kind of Ray-Ban style frame with a sleek matte dark blue finish, contrasting the bright orange of the VITURE logo on the left side pretty nicely. The lenses have a distinct dark blue tint at the top half that’s permanently there, and then a semi-translucent half below that. The magic of the electrochromic film that’s on here though is with the press of a button on the left arm, the lens blacks out. It isn’t 100% effective, still letting you see a faint copy of the word behind the displays, but compared to the translucent mode it’s worlds different. 

There are actually only three buttons on here, the single button on the bottom of the left arm to control the lenses and toggle between the “axis adjustment” and volume corrections, and the volume rocker style switch behind it, which controls the brightness of the displays, that ‘axis adjustment’ and volume. You do have two speakers built into the arms that in theory fire directly down into your ears, but in my experience they are… how do I say this politely… god awful. They’re tinny, compressed, not overly loud, and considering one of the key selling points of this sort of display is the ultimate level of screen privacy you get (in theory, we’ll come back to that), the speakers seem to project more outwards then into your ears, so know that you have absolutely no audio privacy with these. 

On the other arm you’ll find the magnetic connector that basically just passes the full USB C pinout to the glasses. The included magnetic cable isn’t all that long so you definitely need your display source close by. It requires DisplayPort ALT mode over USB C, as you might expect, so generally laptops and phones are the best sources for this. While there aren’t any other controls on the right arm, it’s worth noting that I’m pretty confident that all the processing hardware is buried in that left arm. How can I be so confident in saying that? Well that’s easy. The right arm hits 40 degrees C, give or take. It is noticeably warm, and that heat does translate into your right temple, which can get a little uncomfortable. Whenever you take them off, especially if you’ve been using them for a little while, you can’t help but notice the right side of your head is rather toasty… Anyway, carrying on the tour, the glasses come with five nosepiece options. Almost exclusively altering the height they sit on your head. Interestingly for me, none of them were a perfect fit, although the default set worked the best out of all the options. You do also have to dials up at the top that essentially let you correct for focus – something us non perfect vision folks sorely need. There is some amount of interpupillary distance correction, namely that “axis adjustment” setting I mentioned earlier which does help correct for some of the cross-eyed-ness you otherwise feel, although the adjustment range isn’t exactly massive and it still isn’t the easiest to look at. I should also note that if you have astigmatism – like I do – the focus correction only goes so far to helping you. I decided to write this entire script using these, and I can’t understate just how difficult that was for me. How many spelling errors I had to come back on my desktop and correct, and how much time was spent with one eye closed desperately trying to read what I’d written. Using these for productivity isn’t exactly ideal, at least for me. 

With that said, I can’t deny the Sony Micro OLED displays aren’t frankly amazing. They are sharp, fast, fluid and vibrant AF. They supposedly output 4000 nits of brightness, with 1000 of those nits making it to your eyes, and I can say that at least with the glasses darkened, you will never struggle for brightness here. I sat in direct summer sunlight shining straight at my face and could still see the displays just fine. With the glasses untinted, in transparency mode effectively, you will struggle to see the displays when there is really any light around. Since these are projectors, the same rules apply as a conventional projector, meaning without the dark backdrop the contrast ratio goes out the window. Black becomes grey (and a transparent grey at that), so only the bright objects stay nicely visible. Of course being OLEDs the response times are functionally instant, and having a 120Hz refresh rate makes these incredibly smooth. 

Naturally I did try gaming on them. You’d imagine that a 120Hz OLED per-eye would be an absolute dream, but, well, it isn’t. Unlike VR, these XR glasses don’t do any form of motion tracking. They are just static displays, but any amount of head movement means the displays follow with you, but without the in-game world keeping up. That means even someone like me who never gets motion sick feels pretty uncomfortable with moving even a little while gaming. It’s better with static content like writing this script, but in games it’s quickly a barf-fest. I wasn’t able to do any response time or latency testing, but at least to the eye it seems pretty quick. While perfectly stationary, it still is a far cry from both VR and just a nice display as a kind of worst-of-both-worlds experience to me. Part of that is likely my vision problems – although those don’t inhibit a good VR experience… – but equally this just isn’t the best gaming display.

Something you might have noticed though is that for the most part I’ve been talking about using this with a PC – a laptop specifically – when half the marketing around these things is about using them with your phone. That is for a couple reasons. First, these can only duplicate your display. For a laptop that’s fine because you can use the keyboard and mouse without seeing them pretty easily, and you can even disable your laptop’s display in favour of using these. But for your phone? Well that’s where it gets weird. Your phone’s screen must stay on the whole time you’re using these, meaning you drain your battery at least twice as fast as just looking at your phone’s screen. Second, you need to see your phone’s screen to interact with it, something the glasses obviously can’t let you do without looking past or through them. VITURE did send over something they think should help with that, which is this, their smartphone game controller made in partnership with 8bitDo. This is supposedly the “worlds first XR compatible mobile controller”, likely because it’s the only controller to fully populate the USB C pinout for passthrough. It does have all the fancy controller features you’d expect like hall effect joysticks and two extra buttons on the back, and of course mobile controller features like an easy slide-out mechanism to let you slot your phone in the middle, and a grippy rubber pad on the back to keep it there. The USB port that connects to your phone does have a fair bit of flexibility to accommodate different phone sizes, and I’m happy to report it feels like a pretty neat controller. The grips are nicely shaped for a comfortable hold, and everything is pretty well positioned for an enjoyable experience with it. 

The same concerns I have for gaming on these glasses carry over to mobile gaming, albeit with significantly worse visual quality and performance. If anything, trying this out for as long as I have has only proven how uncomfortable these things are to use for long periods – at least for me anyway, your mileage may vary. Between the right arm cooking my temple and the nosepiece crushing my nasal bone, on top of the visual discomfort of having lacking focus and clarity, meant I was looking for any excuse I could to take them off. These aren’t something I really enjoyed using, and they aren’t something I’m keen to incorporate into my day-to-day life any time soon. It’s also worth noting that the marketing images make these look a lot more subtle than they actually are. From basically one specific angle they do look like pretty conventional glasses, but any other angle – especially side-on – you can see just how weird these things look on you. Due to the display thickness, these sit remarkably far from your head which gives them quite the odd appearance. 

There are actually two extra options when it comes to using these glasses – and both are VITURE software features that are… interesting. First is the “SpaceWalker” app which in theory lets you use these as kind of AR glasses, similar to Apple’s Vision Pro’s, placing windows in fixed real-world space, then physically turning your head to see different windows. The problem with this is that the view window is really pretty small through the displays, and since there isn’t proper 3D tracking, only pan and tilt effectively, all you get is a super zoomed-in view of the virtual displays. It also takes a full minute to enable, and as far as I can tell you can’t reset the virtual position after enabling it without closing the app and then restarting and waiting another minute just to use the thing. The theory of this seems really cool, but this implementation leaves a lot to be desired. The same can be said for the other app, Immersive 3D, which in theory offers an automatic 2D to 3D experience, but in practice gives you a 5FPS slideshow of whatever you are watching or doing, and a splitting headache from all the flickering. I wish I could show you what I mean properly – capture it on camera – but I’ve not really been able to film anything from these displays well. You’ll just have to take my word for it that these experiences need a lot of refinement before I can really even judge the idea, let alone the execution.

Where these do shine, pun intended, is with content consumption. These are the perfect things to watch TV in bed. Just chill with your glasses on binge watching Netflix (on your own, mind you) from your phone. No more phone-falling-on-your-face problems, no tired arms from holding your phone up or having to lie in uncomfortable positions just to watch something. These are the answer. Now, do I think I’d be willing to spend $400 to solve that problem? Hell no. Especially as the aforementioned comfort and vision problems are still very much present, but for the right person, maybe this is worth it. I can’t imagine using these out and about, or on public transport – if you did you’d at very least need some headphones to go with them thanks to both the speaker quality and direction – so this feels like an at home, alone, type deal. If that sounds like something you’d find useful, then sure, give these a go. They aren’t perfect – the heat issue is pretty hard to ignore – but most of my complaints here are that they don’t fit me well, but that implies they might fit someone else fine. The controller is $79 on it’s own which seems pricey, or $59 if you get them with the $409 glasses which isn’t so bad. Whether these are worth it very much depends on if you feel you’ll make use of them AND if they fit your head and eyes well, so while they very much aren’t for me, I wouldn’t rule them out entirely. They are cool, and the fact you can get 1080p 120Hz Micro OLED displays in a pair of realistically not all too weird shaped glasses AND for a couple hundred bucks is absolutely insane (in a good way), and maybe a more refined version two of these might be a little more palatable for me. Either way, they’re cool, but not for me.