Data & Dimensions | Ep. 12 - Spatial Computing Slims Down For Smart Glasses

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Ralph Jodice (cold open):   00:00:00

So what we learned back in 2019 was we need to take some of the tech out of this, and we need to meet the customer where they're at. There weren't developers creating XR apps at scale like this in 2019. There weren't people ready to buy the product, there weren't reatil channels ready to go to scale.

Neil Barbour   00:00:25

Welcome to Data and Dimensions, a podcast at the intersection of entertainment, industry and interactivity. I'm Neil Barbour, an analyst with S&P Global Market Intelligence, Kagan. So let's talk about smart glasses. Last year, we made a call for this market to get to 20 million units shipped annually by 2029. And there are plenty of signals this year that this could end up being a conservative forecast. There are 3 primary subsegments that we're thinking about in smart glasses. The one currently doing most of the heavy lifting is audio-based smart glasses that can give you voice notifications, turn-by-turn directions and support media playback. The second is display-based all-day wearables that put visual notifications in your field of view. These are positioned as sort of a heads-up display that can minimize how many times you have to pick up your phone throughout the day. Then there's this third other group of personal media devices that have been in the market for at least a decade. These basically mirror the content on the device they're tethered to, such as a smartphone or a handheld gaming device to give you a big screen experience on the go. Today, we're going to zoom in on that third market, which probably has a smaller overall opportunity in terms of shipment volumes, but may end up having an outsized impact on the future of spatial computing. And with me today is Ralph Jodice, General Manager of North America and Global Head of Partnerships and Publicity with Xreal. Ralph, thanks for being on the show.

 

Ralph Jodice   00:01:37

Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

 

 

Neil Barbour

Xreal is a smart glasses company that got started as Nrreal in 2017. It gained recognition for lightweight consumer AR glasses, such as the Nearl Light and later the Xreal Air series designed for entertainment, gaming and productivity. In 2023, Nreal rebranded to Xreal as it expanded internationally and broadened its ambitions in spatial computing. The new-new for Xreal is Project Aura, tethered smart glasses leveraging Google's Android XR platform. It's basically doing all or at least most of the stuff that Apple Vision Pro or the Quest 3 was doing a year or two ago, but in a much smaller form factor. Ralph, let's jump right in there. I tend to think of Xreal glasses as these really good portable content or productivity screens. But by and large, the experience is a little passive. Aura seems to unlock all these opportunities around interactivity being more immersed. How big of a generational leap are you guys making here?

 

Ralph Jodice   00:02:34

It is a significant change as we move into full spatial computing that Project Aura is capable of. Like you said, we've been wearable displays. We've been more of a passive screen through glasses that you wear on your face. And that's great. It's where we've come from. It is how we've learned. It's how we've introduced ourselves to XR enthusiasts globally. And the change from the wearable display glasses that we've had in market for the last 5 years to this big shift into full spatial computing with Project Aura is significant. I think generational is a fair way to put it. And that comes from having all these additional components come into this package. All the pieces are finally there. The optics, the display, the audio, the compute, such a major piece. And then the AI, I'm going to say it, the AI, it's such an important element of this. They all come together through what Google brings to the table, what Qualcomm brings to the table and what Xreal brings to the table. It's 3 titans bringing their superpower, and they all are better together. So yes, it's pretty generational.

 

Neil Barbour   00:03:50

What's the market you're trying to carve out here? What are the key customer personas you expect to drive demand for this project?

 

Ralph Jodice   00:03:56

Yes. I don't want to use a BS answer of all of the markets, but there is a reality where there are many of the markets that work. But to be a little more pointed with the response to answer your question, there is absolutely a prosumer market, the professional consumer who is looking for the right device for work and play because that is something we are really good at doing both. We're not just going to be focused on one vertical. So it's not just one customer. But that prosumer who needs more real estate, who's used to having big screens, who's used to maybe having a 40-inch curved physical screen, that's not every consumer. That's more of a prosumer or a gamer who wants more real estate in their screen or just the entertainment enthusiast who wants 3D movies. So it's a little bit of multiple avenues. So it's the prosumer, it's the gamer, it's the desktop warrior, it's the business traveler. So what's beautiful about what we've done to date, right? Our wearable displays are pretty versatile. If you want to work, you got it. If you want to play, you got it. If you want to watch, you got it. And Project Aura kind of dials that up to the 9s because it gives you a bigger, faster, stronger unit because the compute is now built into this compute unit -- we have just a multitude of apps that can be launched from Google Play Store. We can also connect our compute unit to your PC to extend your virtual desktop. But we're still killer for video experiences. We're amazing for gaming experiences. So not to dodge your question, but like it really is a lot of different verticals and different markets. We're not going to be all things to everybody. But if you want to explore wired XR glasses for work, we have really killer use cases for you. If you want to explore wired XR glasses for fun and for play, you're going to be able to do a multitude of that. If you're a developer and want to start creating and tinkering and build your own thing, we've also got you covered. So we can do a little bit of everything, but we're really good at doing all the things also.

 

Neil Barbour   00:06:20

Right. And when you say prosumer, that's sort of a niche market with a lot of disposable income. But I also think about when you look at the Vision Pro and to a certain extent, the Quest 3, the pricing is a little bit out of the range for most consumers, particularly now that DRAMageddon has set in and sort of push those prices even higher. So I wonder, does this unlock some consumers who were curious about, oh, I want to take 3D photos or watch 3D films, but I'm not so into being -- to wearing a big bulky headset that costs $3,000. I mean, are you seeing building on that market as small as it already is, are you guys looking at that subsegment, too, like not only building up from what you guys -- from your existing customer base, but down from maybe what Apple Vision Pro was doing 18 months ago?

 

Ralph Jodice   00:07:13

Wait, and fit and feel is really important. I do believe that is among one of the turnoffs of some of the bigger bulkier heavier VR helmets. They weigh too much. You feel that pressure on your nose, on your ears, on your temples, on your head, which can make it inaccessible. It can make it a bit of a pain to travel with. We solve for that with 91 grams and below for a multitude of glasses. So yes, and then price is important, especially in today's economy with DRAMageddon, like you said, that's really important. Our wearable display Xreal glasses today don't suffer from that because they are wearable displays. They plug into your computer into your phone into your handheld gaming console. So we don't have that same issue that a lot of these other manufacturers are feeling. That's why we've been able to like lower the price. So a month ago, we lowered the price of our Xreal 1 Pro from $650 to $600 in perpetuity. Our XReal 1S that came out in January lowered the price from its predecessor from $500 to $450. So we're able to bring our prices down on our wearable displays. And then our spatial computing device, our Project Aura, because that is a full spatial computer, it has its own dedicated compute, that will be a bit of a different price. We haven't announced that yet. We'll get there when we get a little closer to launch, but it's not $3,500. I can guarantee that.

 

Neil Barbour   00:08:46

But to offer listeners a sense of scale, I weighed my own glasses the other day at non-smart glasses, they're about 35 grams. So the smart glasses that you're talking about are double that, but then compare that to the Vision Pro, which are -- which is like an 800, 900 gram experience. So -- but I would also say when going from 30 to 60 grams resting on your nose, you notice it, but it's not -- it's a pretty comfortable experience, particularly for like short flights that things of that nature. Can I double-click too on the pricing structure for some of your legacy hardware or the existing rack? Is that because there's not a lot of the in-demand components, your memory, your storage, things of that nature, is that how you're able to sort of move in the opposite direction of most of the rest of the consumer electronics market, which is getting more expensive?

 

Ralph Jodice   00:09:38

Yes, and that is part of it because we don't have to go buy memory for these glasses that are in market already. That memory exists inside the phone it's plugged into the computer it's plugged into, the steam deck it's plugged into. Those devices are having to go fight for that, and that's a challenge. And we get that, and we don't want to pass that cost along to our customers. That would be just crummy of us. So if we can lower the price of our devices, we will. And we have. Like I said, we just dropped $50 off the Pro and $50 off the one that converted to the S. So yes, we'll lower prices when we can because we don't suffer those same component issues. The other side of that is we build like 70% of the BOM ourselves. We own our own factories and production lines. We build like our chip that's inside of our glasses and our optics engine. We do a lot of it ourselves. So we're able to kind of control some of the pricing of that ourselves, which is great. We are not beholden to a lot of other manufacturers or components to a certain degree. So that plays a role in it also. And that was really important to us to be able to offer choice and value, choice and value, choice and value. We want to have multiple product lines in the market at once at different prices points so a customer can choose how they want to come into the Xreal ecosystem. And that was what's behind the new sub-brand that we just announced the other day. Again, this is $299. This is an awesome way to offer a category for the gateway market, the folks who want to dip their toes in, but don't always want to pay a premium price for the most high-end device. That's cool. We're supportive of that. Not everybody wants to jump in at $600, totally fair. If I don't have to, I don't want to either.

 

Neil Barbour   00:11:29

So it feels like smart glasses are kind of having a big moment or leading up to a big volume shipment moment in the next few years. But part of that is what you guys are doing, the really immersive experience that you put on and take off as needed. And then there's this other market of all-day wearables, and that's more what Meta is doing right now. Walk me through how you think about these 2 subsegments. Are they complementary? Are you in direct competition?

 

Ralph Jodice   00:11:55

There are all-day wearables, and we know we are not that. And we are not trying to be that. We're not trying to pull one over on you. We're not trying to position Xreal AR glasses as an all-day wearable like a Meta Ray-Bans is. I've got my Meta Ray-Bans. That's an all-day wearable. They're really good at that. What we are is an all-day portable, right? Because our glasses fit in your bag really easily. The case they come in fits in your bag or if you want to tuck them in your pocket. We know we're an all-day portable, and that's what we want to be. When you need a big screen, reach for Xreal glasses. Whether you're on a flight and you need to do some work or you're on a flight and you want to watch something, you can't open your laptop maybe you need a private screen and you don't want your laptop visible to others around you, maybe you're in a cafe. Maybe like old Ralph, you're sitting at the kitchen table today where I don't have my external monitors, but I can put on my Xreal glasses and now I can have a 310-inch curve screen. anywhere I want in space. We know we're not an all-day wearable, but we are an all-day portable. And those are just different categories. And there is room for both, right? Customers are showing us there's room for both, that the Ryzen OST hardware is on the rise, while VR is a little bit declining, but that no display or limited display has still got quite a bit of TAM, but there is room for all of it.

 

Neil Barbour   00:13:20

Not to put you on the spot here, what percentage of your work from home are you doing inside of Xreal glasses?

 

Ralph Jodice   00:13:26

Brother, there's not going to find a bigger power user than me. So I work in my Xreal glasses 4 hours a day probably. No kid -- no kidding because I work on multiple laptops. I've got an awesome Dell Pro Max when I need power and beef. And then I've got a more versatile slimmer Microsoft Surface when I'm on the go. In either case, I got rid of my physical monitors. Of course, I don't travel with a physical monitor who would. But I sit down at my desk in my office. There's not monitors on my desk. I sit at the kitchen table. There's not monitors on my table. I go to my Xreal satellite office and there's not monitors there. So I work in my glasses because I need to know the product better than anybody, and I encourage others also. Well, legitimately, I can get by 4 hours and the comfort is not a problem. It feels good, it fits good, and I have that big virtual workspace I need. But then somebody with a brain like mine that can maybe move a little fast sometimes, I need to be able to block out the world around me, and I can do that just by touching a button and my glasses go dark and now I can't see my LEGO sets in the room that might otherwise distract me or I can't see, oh, my kitchen is right there, that might distract me. I can use our electrochromic dimming, block out the world around me and I can just focus. So I'm in them 4 hours a day. I do my conference calls in my glasses. And that means when I'm seeing other people, they're 6 feet tall, they look like Jor-El in the Superman movies when him and the Science Council were massive and like, I like that. I feel like I can focus more.

 

Neil Barbour   00:15:03

Is there a path to Xreal getting into stand-alone smart glasses? I mean I think you kind of already answered that you guys know what you are. You have an identity, you've picked a lane. But maybe even just with a pair of audio-only frames, leverage that distribution network and that customer base you've already stood up and meet maybe more price-sensitive consumers, maybe consumers that are just looking for that to turn that dial a little bit to the left and say, I'm not looking for an immersive experience, but I would like to try an all-day wearable or something to that effect.

 

Ralph Jodice   00:15:32

Is there a path? Yes. Are we going to do it? Maybe. I'm not announcing a new product today. I'm not announcing that we're going to go build audio glasses. But maybe we are certainly evaluating that. We've got stuff in the labs. We've got stuff made. And then we're hardcore evaluating what to add to our road map because we've got a lot in market today. But our bread and butter is immersive cinematic visuals. That's what brought us to the dance, and we're really good at it. So you can bet that we're going to keep our focus on the thing that we're really good at, on the thing that differentiates us, but we're absolutely evaluating what to add to the road map and what makes sense for Xreal and our brand and what our customers want, but then also what other customers want. We want to meet them where they're at. So that's a pretty nonanswer, but we're definitely thinking about it.

 

Neil Barbour   00:16:28

Yes. I mean, I guess not to hammer away at this, I bring it up because I was walking through, I believe it was this Walmart perhaps Target over the holidays. So this is going back 6 months now, and they just had a rack of something that just said smart glasses and they were $20 a piece or something like that. I don't know what volume of shipments they were doing there, but it seemed like it was definitely a response to curiosity in the market, and you guys are sitting right next to that vertical. It's interesting to hear your perspective.

 

Ralph Jodice   00:16:58

Yes. And I'll tell you what we don't want to do. We don't want to make stuff because others are making stuff, right? And we don't want to make stuff just because we can. We can do a lot of things. We want to make stuff because it makes sense and because there's a customer demand for it and because we are innovators, and we want to lead in this market. So we have to think about all those angles as we build out our road map, as we think about new products. We don't want to make really cheap stuff just because we could. We value the quality of what we make. And that is why our products today are premium at $650 down to $600, at $500 down to $450. Make no mistake about it. I know that's still $450 and $600. That's not a small amount of money. We have the $2.99 model coming into the market soon. But we don't want to just make a $50 pair of audio glasses because we can. We want to make quality and quality that brings something to you. So we're going to pay attention to the market. We're going to continue to innovate and lead but hold us accountable if you see us making cheap crap because that is not what we want to do.

 

Neil Barbour   00:18:17

There's a correlation to that in the early VR market, too, perhaps going back to, let's say, 2014, '15, '16 when all these snap-in headsets came to market, a really low-priced, use-your-phone. And I don't want to invoke poisoning the well here too early, but there's an idea that people -- that's their first touch point for the technology. They are underwhelmed by it, and they don't come back or they don't come back for a long time. Something that we've talked about a lot on the show is the chicken and the egg problem with emerging hardware. Developers want scale before they commit and consumers want compelling apps before they buy in. You guys have done a lot to sort of bring both into the market, right? So there's this idea of introducing lower-cost options and then partnering with Google here. Talk about how those threads intersect. And I know that was a long-winded question. I hope that made a little bit of sense for you.

 

Ralph Jodice   00:19:14

It makes a ton of sense. It's a great question. And the egg was here first. The egg was here first. Dinosaurs have proven that to us, which evolved into chicken. If -- so the egg in my bad analogy is vision, A vision, not the vision product, a vision. And we have a vision, and that is the most important starting point is a vision and then a vision that matches what customers want. So what we have learned as we had a vision when we started this company back in 2017 was -- it was a big vision that included a lot of technology. And that's why the first product that we shipped was called Nreal Light. It had everything. It had optics, it had rich visuals, it had cinematics. It had 6 DOF, it had RGB. And in 2019, when we launched that product, there was not an industry, the customers were not there and the developers were not there. Now we were very innovative to have the vision and to create that product, but the industry and the pieces weren't there. I'm not saying it, but arguably, one might say, did Vision Pro find themselves in a similar scenario. They created an amazing piece of technology that is so performant. Are all the developers there, are all the customers there? I think they are, but at that price, maybe they're not. So what we learned back in 2019 was we need to take some of the tech out of this, and we need to meet the customer where they're at. There weren't developers creating XR apps at scale like this in 2019. There weren't people ready to buy the product. There weren't retail channels ready to go to scale. So we took Nnreal Light, and we took a lot of the stuff out. We took out the RGB cameras. We took out the 6 DoF sensors. We took out SLAM, and that got us to our Xreal Air series, which was just a wearable display. So the big lesson for us was right, chicken, egg, we went too big, too fast, but we showed what was possible, vision, but then we peeled back a little bit to bring customers products that can sell. And that's how we sold 100,000 units and then 200,000 units and 300,000 units. That's how we started to grow and scale. That's what helped put us on the map and maybe give others confidence to jump into the AR glasses game. We certainly see a lot more products that look pretty familiar to what XReal has been building for a couple of years. But now here we are in the middle of 2026, and those things are very ready. And we'll come back to your first question, -- but we're at a turning point, and I don't use the term lightly, but we're at a turning point where all the pieces are here. There are absolutely developers killing it in the XR space. There are absolutely customers ready to buy, invest, play, watch and work in the XR space. There are more hardware manufacturers and component manufacturers, like the pieces are here, which is why we're so confident that Project Aura is the right fit. The developers are out there making killer content. Google has nailed it with the Android XR platform. It is the right way to approach this, an open XR platform, awesome. Qualcomm is bringing killer chipsets that power all these experiences from the compute point of view. And then what we can do with like a 70-degree field of view, SLAM sensors plus RGB, lightweight hardware, that makes the package. So yes, the pieces are here now where the chicken and egg can both go forward together and evolve into I'm going to lose this analogy, but Tyrannosaur 2.0. I don't know.

 

Neil Barbour   00:22:57

So when you sit somebody down inside of Project Aura for the first time, what is the first thing you show them? What is your killer app? What's your big demo?

 

Ralph Jodice   00:23:04

Oh man, it's such a great question because there's a lot of fun answers to it. Now I've got my answer to it because it's the thing that I'm so impressed with that I really like to do, but there are a couple of different experiences. And I want to know who the customer is, who the person is, who the demoer is. Are they a gamer? Do they want to play games? Are they a hardcore work aholic who wants to dive in on Excel and different work platforms? Are they finance and want to see all their markets in 3D space.

 

Neil Barbour   00:23:39

What do you have somebody just wander off the street and you don't know anything about them, but you know this is going to knock them down.

 

Ralph Jodice   00:23:47

Google Maps, which I think is such a fun answer, and that's my go-to. -- because Google Maps immersive viewing through XR glasses is so cool.

 

Neil Barbour   00:23:57

Are we talking about street view or is like -- go ahead, I'm sorry. I mean...

 

Ralph Jodice   00:24:02

Yes. It's a combination of street view, but also immersive world view. Google's nailed it on this because the immersive view, particularly made for XR, so not just what we see on our phones or computers, it's immersive. It's 360-degree views through glasses, which means your peripherals are still open, which means you can still see the world around you. So you're not going to walk into the wall, you're not going to walk into traffic. I find it so impactful because I can really travel the world in this immersive view, and then I can double-click into a street view that is life size. It is scale. It's so thin and cool. So that's why I get kind of energized about it because it's really easy to understand of like, okay, I'm in an immersed world, seeing the world or seeing my street view or going and visiting New York City or Arlington, Virginia or Seattle, Washington. That's one of the go-tos that I do because it's instantly impactful and people get to explore and they start to smile and they start to walk around, and it's really cool. So that's one that I will go to. Another one I'll go to is bringing holograms into the real world, where I am adding something on top of the world around me. When I do Google Maps and Street View, it's VR. It's -- I'm fully immersed. When I do something like a beautiful little game called Cubism, it's a really beautifully produced game where I'm grabbing blocks in the real world, these virtual blocks, and I'm solving a puzzle right here on my kitchen table or sitting out on the back patio where I'm still very much in my local environment, but I'm grabbing invisible holograms and I'm bending them and moving them to fit into place. I find that one really impactful.

 

Neil Barbour   00:25:51

Right. So that's kind of like the Quest 3S pass-through functionality Yes, but in the smaller form factor.

 

Ralph Jodice   00:25:58

And in honest to goodness, optical see-through. It's not video pass-through, like Video pass-through is technically impressive. but there is enough of motion to photon latency. And then it is video reproduction of the real world around me, which is just a little different, seeing the actual real world around me through my glasses with my holograms in it, it feels natural, it feels super comfortable. It makes...

 

Neil Barbour   00:26:23

Interesting distinction because it goes back to what was it, the Magic Leap heuristic where you actually are imposing digital imagery on the real world instead of taking a photo or a video of the real world and imposing digital imagery on that. You talk about Apple Vision Pro not being able to come in at a very good price point. And there were indications that maybe they wanted to bring out a strip-down model, perhaps tariffs, upstream component costs sort of scrambled that vision. When you guys look at next year, -- are you worried that these pricing impacts will only get worse and sort of scramble the value proposition? Or are you pretty confident you can come to market at a compelling price point?

 

Ralph Jodice   00:27:14

I will first shout out again that Vision Pro is a really impressive piece of hardware -- and the software is killer also. So I want to give them the respect they deserve for making something because Apple don't miss on hardware, like very impressive stuff. So again, super technically impressive. The price is what it is.

 

Neil Barbour   00:27:34

I certainly don't mean to denigrate Apple. I agree that it's a very impressive engineering feat. I more or less use that as a touchstone here just to compare the technology, I guess.

 

Ralph Jodice   00:27:45

Yes. What we like to say is 90% of the experience at 10% of the cost. And that is not an exact ratio because we're not going to be 10% of the cost. But we can do so much of the experience. But for example, we don't have eye tracking. We don't have inward-facing cameras and sensors. It's hard to build that into something as small as glasses. We also don't need it with what we're capable of doing. So 80% to 90% of the experience at a fraction of the cost. So yes, we are looking at how we can keep our costs lower. We'll talk about price for Aura when we get to the preorders and sales moment. It's just a little too early in the year. But make no mistake about it, it is this year, it is 2026. It is later this year. But yes, we are working through all those elements of how we try to keep the BOM down so we can have the cost be a little more accessible.

 

Neil Barbour   00:28:43

There's a lot of volatility in the market. But you sound confident that you can kind of work through that at this point.

 

Ralph Jodice   00:28:50

Yes, I'm confident we can work through that. And then I also want to help people's expectations be met and be realistic. Like I said earlier, we make premium products. Our glasses at $600 and $450. I get it. They're still $600 and $450. We have an amazing product that we just started shipping with ASUS ROG, really awesome collaboration. That's got a different price on it. So I want to set the expectation that this is still premium, and there's a lot that goes into the Project Aura headset and compute unit because it is a combination of glasses plus puck. This one has compute unit. It's an AI computer by itself. That involves a lot more componentry. I'm confident that we'll be able to get the pieces. We have all the pieces done, right? We found the RAM. We know how -- we've built all the pucks and the glasses. So that's all good. We'll tell you about the price when we get to those consumer moments. But it's a little bit more than our glasses that are not stand-alone AI spatial computers by themselves. But it is a little more accessible than a $3,500 stand-alone headset. It's somewhere in between.

 

Neil Barbour   00:30:03

If we came back and had another conversation in 18 to 24 months, and you told me Project Aura worked, what would success look like? Is it units, traction, developer engagement? There's still -- this is -- there's still runway here even if you don't have a blockbuster sales case. Talk to me about what success looks like.

 

Ralph Jodice   00:30:24

Yes, there's a few ways to define success. But right off the bat, it is content that attracts customers that leads the way to version 2.0. And I think most hardware manufacturers will probably say the same thing. But what we know is content sells these types of devices. You need amazing content. So success looks like having an amazing bank of brilliant developers cranking out awesome experiences. And this is a stone-cold superpower of Android and Android XR is developer attraction, retention, giving them all the tools they need to just bring your dreams to life. And like Android is awesome at this. Android XR is proving super good at this. So one benchmark of success is so many developers cranking away, making killer experiences. There's a use case for that. There's a use case for everything. So that's going to be one benchmark of success. That the development flywheel content. That's right. Set the development flywheel, which gives customers a reason to buy, which drives adoption. So yes, we'd love to see a really high mass market adoption, and that gives confidence to go build version 2.0. That hopefully ups the specs. So we -- like I said earlier, sure, we have a road map, but we're going to have a really awesome successful Project Aura developer cycle right now and then a consumer launch and then let that thing just continue to get bigger, faster, stronger, better. So we are confident in what Aura is going to do for developers, for customers, for enterprise, 3 different segments. So we're confident in all that. So 24 months from now, success looks like just amazing apps, wide-scale adoption and then confidence to go build version 2.0.

 

Neil Barbour   00:32:18

Yes. Xreal really strikes me as a patient company. It's funny to think about you're a smart glasses company that's a decade old now. And this technology that's just -- it seems like it's always on the brink of breaking through, but I've been looking at it for a decade. But the tech is getting better, like you say, a lot of the pieces are in place now as well. So a really interesting story to follow over the next year before we leave...

 

Ralph Jodice   00:32:41

If I could throw one more thing out because I'd be remiss if I didn't say. Success also looks like just this proliferation of the platform being Android XR. And there's a multitude of devices in there, which we're super supportive of. So success isn't just XR devices are killing it in the market. Of course, I hope for that. And I expect that to happen. But I'm eager to see other devices in the Android XR family also excelling because we want the proliferation of the platform, which means more developers, which means more content. And that content can live on, I don't know, AI smart glasses. It can live in VR headsets that like our buddies at Samsung make with Galaxy, awesome. It could be on lightweight, lighter content glasses, awesome. And then also on our rich content XR glasses. So proliferation of the platform is a good thing. Other folks making hardware is a good thing because it's a rising tide and all our boats are going to sail with that.

 

Neil Barbour   00:33:42

Before we leave, I wanted to just touch on the partnership with ASUS. We know we have a lot of gamers in the audience or we touch on a lot of gaming-focused content. So XR seems to have a really special relationship with gamers. Just spool that story out for me a little bit.

 

Ralph Jodice   00:33:57

Yes. So what we found when we made that transition from Nreal Light to the first pair of Nreal Airs then Xreal Airs, like we talked about earlier, gamers were our early adopters because gamers are always early adopters. -- love the gaming community. I come from gaming myself. So you love gamers and gamer audiences. It's more than half the connected world. Everybody in one form or fashion is playing a video game, especially on our phones. So what we found was as we pulled some of the tech out and we made "just a wearable display, the first use case was plug into Steam Deck. And that works beautifully. And then as more handhelds came out, ASUS went amazing with the ROG Ally series. I've got one of all of them. And then the ROG Xbox Ally, amazing. And then MSI Claw and then Lenovo Legion Go and then everybody has got an awesome handheld nowadays, which is great because -- the gamer audience is hungry to take that experience on to bigger screens, which is great. So we've always been close with the gamer audience. They were our first adopters. And then ASUS and particularly the ROG brand of ASUS is so good at what they do, right? ROG means awesome displays. It means quality hardware. So this relationship just kind of made sense of Xreal being great at what we do, amazing wearable displays, ASUS and ROG being great at what they do, amazing handhelds and killer hardware and monitors. And it was just this idea of like what if we put them together. And we're really excited about it. It just came into market like 2 weeks ago. So it's still early days, but we're excited to grow it, see it and see how customers respond to it.

 

Neil Barbour   00:35:44

Is that the one you're using when you work from home as well?

 

Ralph Jodice   00:35:46

It's -- I use all ours. I'm in and out of all of them. So yes, I definitely use it when I'm playing, right? Like that's my daily driver when I'm playing games, and I play games on every device out there. My daily handheld driver is the ROG Xbox Aly. So that's my daily handheld driver, but then I'll jump into a switch to a lot. I'll jump into Lenovo Legion. But then if I'm connected on to my computer or phones, I'll probably swap into a different pair of XRels. When I'm on the go, I will use my Project Aura early kit. But I love the look and feel of the ROG glasses because they just have such a distinct design to them. I love the light field where I can do that rainbow design in light field that's so freaking cool. And again, when I can get 240 refresh off of my console, like, gosh, that's cool.

 

Neil Barbour   00:36:39

My TV is not even doing that, right? So...

 

Ralph Jodice   00:36:42

Yes, right. So I'll typically need a beefy PC stack -- but when I can get...

 

Neil Barbour   00:36:46

You need to back up hardware, right?

 

Ralph Jodice   00:36:48

Yes, cool.

 

Neil Barbour   00:36:49

That's awesome. Well, Ralph, thanks for your time.

 

Ralph Jodice   00:36:52

Thanks for having me. I could keep going and talking. So I appreciate the invite, and I appreciate the conversation.