Rokid Air AR glasses, they are not ready

Let’s start by saying that I chose to try the Rokid over the Nreal only because they were present on the Amazon Italy store and I wanted to understand how advanced this “low cost” AR technology was.

Once I got my head around it I realized that they had nothing to do with Microsoft’s Holo Lens or a more common Meta Quest 2, which offers much more for the same price.

I’ll start by listing what can be considered OK:

• Easy to use, basically plug and play if you have the correct phone/laptop.
• It is light and does not mark the nose, thanks to the soft nose pads and the very solid springs placed in the temples.
• It gives a modern and premium look and feel.
• The screen has an excellent brightness range, excellent for night and day in home contexts.

Now everything I can’t get right:

• It costs too much for what it can do.
• If you are sensitive to motion sickness or have problems with VR, this will make you even more nauseous from the first head movements.
• Superior and peripheral vision is obstructed by the glasses, which therefore makes them unusable for daily use. (I tried to play and cook, but with poor results, a telephone is more convenient)
• The sensation is that of having a 6-inch transparent phone 10 centimeters from the eyes and not a 120-inch screen 3 meters away.
• You can’t adjust the interpupillary distance (PID) outside of the rokid app, so we’ll always have to keep our eyes crossed to match the images when we connect it to the laptop or console.
• The wheels that are advertised as myopia correctors are actually the focus of the screen, so even if you have hawk vision you will still have to set them every time you move the glasses on your nose or your eye will decide it wants to focus. focus on an object closer or further away than it has seen thanks to the transparent lenses.
• You have to place the screen a little in front of your nose so as not to cut off the bottom of the virtual screen, and annoying aberration occurs towards the edges of the screen.

Considerations

IThe real reason I returned the product is that I don’t have a use case for this product. I bought it on impulse, stimulated by the videos of YouTubers/influencers, who praise it for no real reason. (An Oculus Quest 2 is more immersive for games, more comfortable for movies and despite its limitations better at AR)

If you have a compatible laptop, you can mirror or extend the screen, but the writing is too small and you need to set the font size to at least 150%. It is not possible to use it as an extended display, it is very inconvenient to view the virtual screen and then look at the real laptop screen, as the eyes go from a very close focus (crossed eyes) to a far focus, all the while looking through the screen of the glasses.

There are no AR features, the rokid app only offers games that are more suitable for a VR experience than an AR.

In short, don’t buy them and I also have the feeling that the usual experience is also offered by the Rokid Max and the Xreal or Nreal.

Below is a video with overly serious music and bizarre transitions.