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nreal air

I ordered the nReal Air (xReal Air?) glasses.

I guess I had them too close to my eyes as I couldn’t make out the bar at the bottom of the screen, but now the text is a little blurry around the left edge. It seems if I wear them too close they are more comfortable and clear but I have to give up the bottom edge. Or I can let them sit further down my nose, and see everything, but the edges are blurry.

That being said, I can read text! The terminal looks really sexy. While checking out reviews I couldn’t find a single instance of anyone saying how good the terminal looks, so this was really important to me. I’ll try it later with my Switch and eventually my PinePhones.

So, they look great, but will I end up with terrible eye strain headaches?

I’m sitting in my room, no lights are on, but daylight is coming in through the window. I can see other objects in the room as slightly tinted. I’ll probably opt to cover them while using them for any length of time.

The buttons on the frame adjust the brightness. I wish I had tried them sooner, as it was far too bright when they came on.

A few hours later

Does not work out of the box with my PinePhone.

Does not work out of the box with my Switch.

I discovered I need an adapter to use it with the Nintendo Switch. It did not come with an adapter, so I’ve ordered a third party adapter that I can also use with other devices and for other purposes. But on this journey of discovery I ended up getting a weird glitch along the top edge of the screen and had to upgrade the firmware to get rid of the problem. After that, I swear the screen is now slanted by a few degrees and I can’t find a way to adjust it.

I’m less happy that I’ll need extra hardware to use it with most devices. Part of the motivation was to not need as much power and to be able to use it as a primary screen, but I can’t hook most devices up to it without the adapter I’m waiting for, and there’s a good chance I will need to power that while I use it.

The next day

I just realized, no headaches! This was also a big concern because if, for example, I look at a laptop screen in direct sunlight for more than a few minutes I will end up with a massive headache. I did not get a headache from the first session with the glasses. I did a few 30 minute-ish sessions. I’ll try longer over the course of the week.

Disappointments

I tried to play some full screen video in a web browser and the screen would rotate by 90 degrees unless I kept moving the mouse around. VLC and others were fine, so maybe it’s a Firefox issue.

The firmware update was needed to fix the weird color bar across the top of the screen. And I had to use Chrome to run the update, which isn’t so bad, but I had to download and install it and that’s annoying with my slow connection.

The Nebula client wiggles too much to use the AR screen, I prefer the dumb mode of just being a large HDMI device, but then I lose the ability to see the entire screen.

I had the brightness too high for the first few minutes of using it, I think this exacerbated the issue of not being able to see the edges.

Update: The adapter arrived and to its credit, it is tiny. But I don’t have any audio for my switch? After some searching I found one comment on a sub reddit (which I’ve now lost) that mentions there is video but not sound when using the nReal Air with the Switch. This is a shame, I liked the speakers.

the day after that

If there is too much ambient light, my reflection is all over my dark terminals and it can be hard to read text with the solarized color scheme in vim. I might have to switch to a light background. I haven’t done this for more than a moment or two because I suspect the light background version of the solarized color scheme may end up being painfully bright if I use it for very long and I want to make sure I don’t end up with headaches from regular use before I try it with bright backgrounds.

The issue of having to choose between a blurry top bar or a blurry bottom bar might be resolved by adjusting the nose bridge, but I need to take that slowly so I don’t end up causing them to permanently sit at the wrong angle.

May be worth keeping

My terminals look great.

I guess graphical stuff does too, but really, I might be able to use these for real work and not just playing games!

The audio quality is pretty good and I don’t have to wear any uncomfortable ear buds or headphones and suffer the problems those usually bring. But this applies to computer use only, game consoles need headphones.

Still have to see how well they (or I) hold up to extended use.

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