The fantasy is this: I have my laptop — or tablet, or phone, whatever’s nearby — and by plugging a small pair of display glasses into it, all the things I need can expand on a big virtual display, making seemingly infinite monitor space for myself. Why? To get more space for myself without having to carry anything big. Headphones for your eyes, in a sense.
Display glasses like Xreal’s and others already work as plug-in displays for lots of devices, and show a virtual monitor that can feel big and TV-like. But they can’t do multi-app multitasking, and that’s why my recent test-drive of Spacetop’s software got me so intrigued. I can see a future forming here, if other software companies figure out a way to work better with things like glasses.
Spacetop is made by Sightful, a startup that I met with several years ago when the concept was a display-free laptop keyboard base bonded with tethered Xreal glasses that became the laptop’s monitor. That product never happened: instead of using custom-made Chromebook-like laptop bases with Qualcomm processors, the founders pivoted over to using more AI-focused “NPUs” on recent thin AI laptops with processors made by Intel, which Sightful’s team says has offered better performance without needing to make a new device to work with glasses.
“The moment we saw [Microsoft’s] announcements about AI computers — that everyone’s computers, in the coming few years, are going to be AI computers — it made perfect sense to say we can enable the audience earlier and faster than if we built our own integrated solution,” Sightful’s founders, Tamir Berliner and Tomer Kahan, told me when Spacetop transitioned to its new business plan last fall. Instead of a whole new “AR laptop,” Spacetop is subscription software that runs on certain Windows laptops and connects with a particular model of Xreal Air 2 Ultra smart glasses.
I can’t shoot photos to show what I saw, but think of it as a larger-size curved space where apps can be laid out from your laptop.
Scott Stein/CNET
The experience: A 180-degree floating desktop
What you get, running this software layer, is a curved desktop space that floats in the air, indicated by small arrays of dots, which you can open Windows apps onto, drag around, and resize as needed. It feels like a desktop for my laptop, but one that’s larger and doesn’t need my laptop screen at all. Provided you’re OK wearing display glasses, this is the way I’d prefer to work: Making my own screens wherever I go and feeling like I’ve got a larger-scale office without needing to prop open anything else.
Spacetop opens up the conversation around what glasses could be doing when connected with our own computers. That’s the part that’s missing on most phones and laptops and tablets right now.
Xreal’s most recent glasses, the Xreal One, already can fix a curved display in space. Spacetop’s software pushes the capabilities more by having more of a handshake with the software on the laptop, which manages what apps will show on-glasses. Qualcomm began working on this type of software with Spaces, which ran on Android phones and interfaced with connected glasses. Google’s upcoming Android XR software looks like it could possibly do the same down the road. Apple’s Vision Pro, which can run a variety of iPad apps and float them anywhere while simultaneously mirroring a Mac monitor, is a bulky device in comparison, and you need both a Vision Pro and a MacBook to float apps around in the way that Spacetop’s software enables.
Spacetop’s rendering isn’t exactly how I saw it, but it’s close enough to describe the effective experience (the field of view in-glasses is smaller, but you can turn your head to see apps all around you).
Spacetop
You can’t do much more than open individual 2D apps up, though. That’s fine for everyday work, and Spacetop’s software is aimed at business subscriptions, for people who might want to get more work space beyond their laptop screen while on the road. I could see a use for this in meetings or in situations where you’d want to be looking at something in the real world while floating windows in the air around you. That might sound bizarre, but I used the Xreal One glasses back in January to take notes on my phone while watching a presentation: my notes app just hovered off to the side of the live speakers I was in the same room with.
Clever details and awkward moments
Spacetop’s little software touches are clever. A little toolbar handles app launching, and a duplicate of your laptop display rests on the bottom of the floating desktop, lining up mostly with the actual laptop display that’s open. I found that I could glance around at the open floating windows and then go down to the laptop screen and adjust settings if I needed to without feeling strange. My mouse cursor came along with me, either floating in air or appearing back on the laptop screen again as needed, mostly automatically.
The glasses connect via USB-C cable to one of the laptop’s Thunderbolt-enabled ports for video and audio to work.
Scott Stein/CNET
That doesn’t mean there aren’t quirks: I found the pop-up displays sometimes were slow to launch or didn’t launch at all, something Sightful suggested I unplug and re-plug the glasses in to fix.
There’s also the limited field of view on the glasses to consider. As good as Xreal’s glasses are at projecting a quality OLED display in the air, the viewing area is still limited to what feels like a boxed-out rectangle in the middle of your vision. It feels like about the same dimensions as a medium-to-large monitor, and can fit a couple of windows (or one large one) into view easily, but to see the rest of the floating apps around you you’ll need to turn your head around to make sure the other parts of the curved desktop come into view. The Xreal Air 2 Ultra glasses can also make your surroundings dimmer like sunglasses, or turn the glasses more transparent as needed, and they have their own speakers.
Prescription inserts are needed for me to use these Xreal Air 2 Ultra glasses, adding an extra layer of thickness. But there are adjustable nose pads.
Scott Stein/CNET
A potential future for glasses (but ideally without a subscription)
The Spacetop subscription is $200 a year, on top of needing a specific pair of $699 Xreal Air 2 Ultra glasses (Sightful is selling the glasses and one year of the software together for $899). Sightful needs these particular glasses because they have full-room tracking capabilities built in, which can be used in a travel mode to make sure the floating monitor stays centered wherever the laptop is. The software also needs to run, for now, on particular Windows AI laptops with Intel NPUs. I tested on an HP Elitebook.
It’s hardly something for the average person right now, but it does show me exactly what I really want: ways for my own laptops and tablets and phones to work better with glasses-as-displays. I think it can happen. Microsoft, Google, and Apple are going to have to wake up and play a better part. In the meantime, Sightful’s Spacetop is making some things happen on its own.
