After successfully fighting off Magic Leap’s claim that it stole trade secrets, Nreal is finally able to launch its Light mixed reality glasses into the consumer market. Starting today, folks in Korea can pre-order the Light — locally rebranded as “U+ Real Glass” — as part of a mobile phone plan on the LG Uplus network, so long as you pick the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 or the LG Velvet as your handset. That way you can buy the Light at a subsidized price of 349,500 won (about $295). You can also purchase the glasses separately for 699,000 won (about $590) at an LG Uplus store from August 21st, if you’d rather use them with other phones.

Nreal

Since Nreal designed the Light with 5G smartphones in mind, this consumer kit lacks the Toast computing unit we saw in earlier demos. What do you gain, however, is a “VR Cover” that blocks out your view of the outside world, thus converting the Light into makeshift VR glasses. They won’t replace dedicated VR headsets given their 52-degree diagonal field of view (it’s the same figure for Microsoft’s enterprise-centric Hololens 2), while most VR headsets exceed 100 degrees here, but it’s still a nice bonus feature for when you want to immerse yourself into games or video.

To get a real-world sense of how Spatial works, I jumped headfirst into the platform to chat with its CEO, Anand Agarawala, and chief product officer Jinha Lee. But before I could do anything, I needed to create an avatar on the company’s site. I snapped a photo with a neutral expression (as instructed), uploaded it, and within a few seconds, I had a creepy digital doppelganger blinking back at me.

Spatial

I’ve had my fair share of VR demos — I was more intrigued to see how Spatial would translate its technology for web browsers. So I kicked off our meeting through Chrome while my Oculus Quest charged up. The onboarding process wasn’t any different than Zoom, Webex or any other collaboration tools: I clicked a personalized link and was thrust into a virtual living room alongside Agarawala and Lee’s avatars.

The 3D room looked a bit muddy, and the framerate wasn’t anywhere near 30 FPS (the bare minimum for smooth-looking 3D worlds), but I could still easily hold a conversation with both of them. My view of the room panned left and right automatically, so I could get a decent sense of the space, but there was no manual control of the camera.