Is the best way to watch a movie on a pair of sunglasses?

I am nothing if not a huge movie buff. I watch way too many of them, and I’m always on the hunt for a new format in which to experience them. So when XREAL, the smart glasses company, sent me an a01 — one of its newer models, which it released in May of this year — I was eager to give them a spin as the newest vector by which to satisfy my media fanaticism.

The a01 isn’t a particularly sophisticated smart glasses model. Unlike more software-heavy AR glasses like, say, the Meta Orion or Snap’s Specs, it’s basically just an external monitor. It also doesn’t have a battery or an internal power mechanism. Instead, a simple USB-C cable plugs the glasses into a device of your choosing, which then becomes the headset’s power source. It’s also not so expensive, at an accessible price point of around $300 .

The a01 is actually optimized for gaming, in that it can be plugged into a Steam Deck or other handheld gaming device. However, XREAL also advertises them as a way to watch movies and TV — and since that’s more my speed, once I had the a01 in hand, I plugged it into my personal laptop and booted up the Criterion Channel. I then sat watching David Lynch’s film Wild at Heart for a while, enjoying a sequence where Nicolas Cage, dressed in a snakeskin jacket, beats up a guy in a bar and then sings an Elvis song.

I’ll say this: the images look quite good. The glasses, which come outfitted with dual mini OLED panels, provide quite a nice image (those panels offer a 1080p resolution with up to 1,600 nits of brightness), with very vibrant colors. If you aim the glasses at a wall, it feels vaguely like you’re using a really vivid home projector — or perhaps are at a drive-in movie. In a dark room, you’re one step closer to the in-theater experience.

However, the overall experience also brought some questions to mind. Namely, why would I sit next to my computer with glasses on my head watching a thing that is also playing on my laptop only 14 inches away? The reason, XREAL offers, is that the glasses are more immersive (indeed, they claim the device’s projections are equivalent to viewing content on a 147-inch screen). Still, the redundancy of watching a movie while it plays right next to you makes you question what the actual purpose of the device is.

XREAL has suggested that the glasses can function as a “second monitor” (indeed, they’ve actually been referred to as a “wearable display” ) but the functionality of this is, again, questionable. It’s rather difficult to see anything other than what the glasses are projecting — which would make it quite difficult to, say, work on a laptop while also wearing them.

The glasses can also be connected to your phone. Unfortunately, I have an older iPhone, which means that the a01’s cable is not compatible with the phone’s port. An adapter would have been necessary to link the two.