Working in Augmented Reality Strained My Eyes

In effect, the virtual desktop can become whatever your preferred monitor setup is. If you’re somebody who codes on three vertically-oriented screens at once or prefers an ultrawide display to house multiple browsers in landscape, you can do it with Spacetop. The real question is: would you want to do it on Spacetop? If I had the choice, I would sooner work on a single monitor than strain against a screen an inch from my eyes.

For review, Spacetop provided me with a preconfigured HP laptop and a pair of Xreal glasses. The software currently only supports Intel Core Ultra Series 1 or 2 CPUs, and you need at least 16GB of RAM and access to a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 USB-C port. The big problem is immediately apparent as soon as you put on the bundled Xreal Air 2 Ultra glasses. The 52-degree field of view on the glasses’ micro-OLED panels is so minuscule that it forces you to turn your head completely to look at any one of your apps at a time. I can’t just glance at my emails on another browser like normal; I have to wheel my noggin around, feeling like a submarine captain staring through the narrow view of a periscope hunting for the one app I need.

While in the office, I do most of my work on a MacBook Pro connected to a 34-inch ultrawide monitor. Two screens are enough for my Slack feed, two large browsers, plus any other extraneous apps I need. I tried to recreate the same layout on Spacetop at home, and after two hours the inevitable eyestrain set in. I sit 30 inches away from a computer for nine hours every Monday through Friday, and I still felt more fatigue in just two hours of doing the same amount of work with Spacetop. The Xreal Air 2 Ultra allows for single-click image dimming, but nothing could fully eliminate the pressure building between my eyes.

It’s a typical downside of having a display right in front of your eyeballs. It’s the same issue I have when trying to work in a mixed reality headset like the Apple Vision Pro. Apple’s $3,500 “spatial computer” has an FOV of around 100 degrees, twice that of the Xreal Air 2 Ultra. While it’s better for multitasking when you can see more of your apps at once, it will still inevitably result in eye fatigue. The Vision Pro has the capability to mirror a Mac screen in an ultrawide format that can stretch from one end of the room to the other. The Xreal glasses are much lighter and more comfortable, but still I found I would need to put them down at around the same point my head would get tired supporting a Vision Pro or Meta Quest.

The benefit of Sightful’s solution is it is far more innocuous than a Vision Pro when you’re in a public space (although you’ll be looking around so much you’ll look like you’re tracking a flying insect only you can see). Spacetop has other smaller issues that make it far more annoying to use than it needs to be. Every time I open up a new window—such as when I open a photo—I have to go fishing for it when it randomly appears in an open space at the top of the AR view. When I hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete, I encountered a glitch where the new window appeared on the desktop view rather than in its own window, which also made the mouse cursor disappear. Hopefully, these problems will be ironed out in future updates.

Spacetop could be just another solution that’s looking for a problem, but as it stands, AR is still better off for mirroring a single screen at a time. I find the Xreal Air 2 Ultra’s displays are high quality enough that I had no problem reading text, and it would be a fine time watching any streaming content from the comfort of a couch. I could imagine a person on the go, whether on a train or plane, could make use of a wider canvas for their apps and browsers. Let’s get even spicier. A person at work who really doesn’t want their boss watching them play video games on their PC may find safety in the world of AR. I didn’t have the opportunity to test how much the AR environment impacted PC performance, but you would still need a hefty GPU to run both the AR environment alongside any other graphically intensive apps.

Sightful promotes some laptops like the 2024 Dell XPS or an Asus Zenbook S14 with Intel Lunar Lake chips that would work well with Spacetop. While the Xreal glasses themselves cost $700 individually, the actual software and glasses bundle costs $900, and it comes packed with a $200 12-month subscription to the Spacetop software. There is no option for a monthly subscription, though Sightful told me they were hoping to add that in the future. The lack of a cheaper subscription is a hard pill to swallow. There’s less of a chance for a refund if you don’t like Spacetop, and it implies there’s less guarantee you’ll recoup your money if the app’s services ever go down.

I still trust that AR glasses will improve, and perhaps with a different type of display, Spacetop’s eye strain may improve. Spacetop does what it sets out to do, but in a way that leaves me desperate for a typical multi-screen experience. This could be the solution for on-the-go workers, but perhaps there’s a time and place for buckling down on that work project. Perhaps you should leave the grindset at home and take that travel time to relax. The screens aren’t going anywhere.