Google I/O 2026 is in full swing, and one of the more tangible hardware demos on the show floor comes from XREAL. The company’s Project Aura glasses, running Android XR, are getting their first real hands-on treatment — and the details reveal a smarter approach to the wired battery problem than what Apple delivered with the Vision Pro.

The Puck That Does Everything

XREAL’s design philosophy has always been about keeping the glasses themselves as slim as possible by offloading compute and battery to an external module. That’s nothing new for the company — their earlier Air and Air 2 series did the same thing with phone-based processing. But Project Aura takes it a step further by making that wired puck genuinely useful rather than just dead weight in your pocket.

Where Apple’s Vision Pro ships a tethered battery that does nothing but supply power, XREAL’s puck contains a Snapdragon chipset, the battery, and the full Android XR processing stack. It also doubles as a touch-sensitive controller for navigating the interface. Google’s Dieter Bohn demonstrated the controller functionality in a video on Threads, showing how you can use the puck as an alternative to hand tracking — which also works thanks to the glasses’ onboard cameras.

This is a meaningful design win for a few reasons. First, it means the battery swap doesn’t kill your session — you can swap pucks without losing the experience since the brains travel with the battery. Second, having a tangible controller alongside gesture recognition gives users a choice between high-precision input (the puck) and casual interaction (hand tracking), depending on what they’re doing.

What’s On the Glasses

According to hands-on reports from Android Central, Project Aura glasses have three cameras total. Two are positioned on either side of the lenses and handle perception and hand tracking. The third sits in the middle and acts as a regular camera for taking photos and video. One stem houses all the physical controls: a volume rocker, a Home/Gemini button, and a dimming toggle that controls the electrochromic lenses — letting you adjust how much passthrough you see.

The electrochromic dimming is a notable feature. It means you can dial in exactly how transparent the display appears, from fully see-through (like standard AR glasses) to fully opaque (more like a VR headset, albeit a very compact one). That flexibility covers a broader range of use cases than a fixed-transparency display.

Additionally, the puck includes DisplayPort over USB-C, so you can pipe external video sources into the glasses — a handy capability for productivity or gaming use.

When Can You Get Them?

XREAL has confirmed Project Aura will launch before the end of 2026. Select Android developers can already apply for early access to the hardware. That timeline puts XREAL ahead of Google and Samsung’s own Android XR display glasses, which Google has said won’t arrive until 2027.

The first Android XR products actually hitting shelves this year will be the audio-only glasses announced at I/O — simpler form factors that provide spatial audio and AI assistant functionality without a display. For anyone wanting actual AR display capabilities, Project Aura is the more interesting near-term option.

The Bigger Picture

The AR glasses market is shaping into a multi-front war. Meta has the Ray-Ban Stories and the upcoming Display variant. Snap has its Spectacles. Google is betting big on Android XR as a platform, with XREAL as a lead hardware partner alongside Samsung. Apple’s Vision Pro exists in a higher price tier, targeting a different kind of spatial computing experience.

What makes Project Aura stand out in this field is the combination of a genuinely useful external module (brains + battery + controller in one puck) with a glasses form factor that doesn’t require a giant visor strapped to your face. It’s not trying to replace your phone — it’s trying to augment it, tethered or not, with Android XR providing the connective tissue.

If XREAL can deliver on the promise and actually ship before the end of the year, it could be the first real taste of Android XR that consumers can actually buy — warts and all.

Key Takeaways

• Integrated puck design: Combines Snapdragon processor, battery, and a touch controller into one wired module — a step beyond Apple’s battery-only approach.
• Three-camera system: Two for hand tracking, one for photos. Electrochromic dimming adjusts passthrough from transparent to opaque.
• Launching 2026: Before Google and Samsung’s own Android XR display glasses. Developer access available now.
• Productivity-friendly: DisplayPort over USB-C lets you connect external devices to the glasses’ display.

Source: 9to5Google | Related: Android Central hands-on | XREAL developer program