Give The Gift Of Extended Reality (XR)

XR means VR, AR, and generally all spatial computing and 3D technologies. We’ve a baker’s dozen ideas here for the holidays, priced from $10 – $1000. I spend most of my studying and writing about the immersive category, and I’ve personally used all the devices and software offered for your consideration here.

Leia Lume Pad 2. $999. This is the priciest of my recommendations, but a 3D display that does not require glasses is a real breakthrough in personal computing. I use it all the time. Stable diffusion is integrated. You can watch 3D movies, turn 2D YouTube videos into 3D without glasses. Leia’s Lume Pad 2 is in a class of its own.

Video Display smart glasses. $349 – $600. This is a whole new category of Assisted Reality smart glass, which is putting a monitor in or around your field of view, like the original Google Glass, which were discontinued at the age of ten last year. The new smart display glasses put a big screen right in front of you. We share four we really like below. They’re all great for media consumption, playing games, or screen expansion for mobile productivity. Instead of looking down at a screen in your hands, you can now sit up and look ahead.

RayNeo Air 2 AR, The Ultimate Mobile Media Display Glasses. $349. A smart phone viewing accessory that delivers a 201″ hi-def screen on the go. We love these glasses, but compatibility is an issue. If you have an iPhone 14 or any with a lightning port, you’re going to need the $99 MiraScreen to go with it.

Xreal Air 2 Smart Glasses Simulate 330-Inch Screen. $339. The biggest, brightest screen this new category of mobile phone accessories delivers. I recommend buying it with the $119 Xreal Beam, a needed iPhone adaptor which allows you to place the screens of varying sizes around the room.

Solos AirGo3, Wearable ChatGPT. $299. Smartglasses just got a lot smarter.

Rokid Max AR Glasses, Big Screen on the Go. $399. One of the best is also the most expensive, but we love the $199 Rokid Station, a great Android device for streaming, and viewing downloaded videos without wi-fi. The light weight Station controller makes media consumption on the Rokid Max feel more like the experience of watching TV on your living room sofa.

Robux. $10 and up. If you’ve got a kid under 16, this makes a great stocking stuffer.

Meta Quest 2. $249. With Quest 3 on the market Meta’s cut the price for the best VR headset on the market. You can find them on eBay for under $100. The Meta Quest 3 starts at $499. It has upgraded graphics, a slimmer form factor, and most importantly upgraded cameras for mixed-reality at a price point far below the upcoming $3,495 Apple Vision Pro. But there’s not much MR to do yet, the games were made for the Quest 2 so the graphics are the same, and while Quest 2 is boxier, it is lighter, and gets less hot than the Quest 3.

Gift Cards for Meta Quest games. No doubt your VR enthusiast has their eye on one of the 275 games in the Quest store.

The World’s Best Golf Simulator. $43 – $500. It’s the winter, and golf simulators are expensive. They also take up a lot of space, and are difficult to set up. Not anymore. Using a Meta VR Headset with the $29 Golf+ app and the perfectly

weighted $43 Hello Real’s Pro Grip Golf you can have an experience better than the one you would have at your country club or in your rich friend’s garage. You actually can practice your swing and get better. The Hello Real grip can also be used with the $15 Walkabout Mini-Golf VR app. A Quest 2 from eBay, the games and the grip could be bundled together to make a terrific gift for under $200. That would be creative.

Real Racer. $150. When we first started thinking about commercial VR in the early 90s, we thought telepresence would be the way to go, looking through stereo cameras and controlling a radio-controlled vehicle wearing a headset. It was impractical and prohibitive. Not anymore. Download the Real Racer app, put your smartphone in the headset, and race around the office, your living room, or outside in the yard.

Zapbox. $80. This product has come a long way from its humble beginnings as the cardboard of AR, what Zappar billed as “Magic Leap for super cheap” when I first encountered them at Augmented World Expo in 2017. This year they’ve re-launched Zapbox. It’s now made of plastic, you don’t need to assemble it yourself, and it’s incredibly light. With my iPhone 15 snapped snugly into place, I was able to test our stereography using the same software and camera the Apple Vision Pro will use.