Spacetop's AR Software Revolutionizes Desktop Experience, but Price May Hinder Adoption

I Always Dreamed of Expanding My Desktop With Glasses. This Software Made It Real

The fantasy is this: I have my laptop -- or tablet, or phone, whatever's nearby -- and by plugging a small pair of display glasses into it, all the things I need can expand on a big virtual display, making seemingly infinite monitor space for myself. Why? To get more space for myself without having to carry anything big. Headphones for your eyes, in a sense. Display glasses like Xreal's and others already work as plug-in displays for lots of devices, and show a virtual monitor that can feel big and TV-like. But they can't do multi-app multitasking, and that's why my recent test-drive of Spacetop's software got me so intrigued. I can see a future forming here, if other software companies figure out a way to work better with things like glasses. Spacetop is made by Sightful, a startup that I met with several years ago when the concept was a display-free laptop keyboard base bonded with tethered Xreal glasses that became the laptop's monitor. That product never happened: instead of using custom-made Chromebook-like laptop bases with Qualcomm processors, the founders pivoted over to using more AI-focused "NPUs" on recent thin AI laptops with processors made by Intel, which Sightful's team says has offered better performance without needing to make a new device to work with glasses. "The moment we saw [Microsoft's] announcements about AI computers -- that everyone's computers, in the coming few years, are going to be AI computers -- it made perfect sense to say we can enable the audience earlier and faster than if we built our own integrated solution," Sightful's founders, Tamir Berliner and Tomer Kahan, told me when Spacetop transitioned to its new business plan last fall. Instead of a whole new "AR laptop," Spacetop is subscription software that runs on certain Windows laptops and connects with a particular model of Xreal Air 2 Ultra smart glasses. What you get, running this software layer, is a curved desktop space that floats in the air, indicated by small arrays of dots, which you can open Windows apps onto, drag around, and resize as needed. It feels like a desktop for my laptop, but one that's larger and doesn't need my laptop screen at all. Provided you're OK wearing display glasses, this is the way I'd prefer to work: Making my own screens wherever I go and feeling like I've got a larger-scale office without needing to prop open anything else. Spacetop opens up the conversation around what glasses could be doing when connected with our own computers. That's the part that's missing on most phones and laptops and tablets right now. Xreal's most recent glasses, the Xreal One, already can fix a curved display in space. Spacetop's software pushes the capabilities more by having more of a handshake with the software on the laptop, which manages what apps will show on-glasses. Qualcomm began working on this type of software with Spaces, which ran on Android phones and interfaced with connected glasses. Google's upcoming Android XR software looks like it could possibly do the same down the road. Apple's Vision Pro, which can run a variety of iPad apps and float them anywhere while simultaneously mirroring a Mac monitor, is a bulky device in comparison, and you need both a Vision Pro and a MacBook to float apps around in the way that Spacetop's software enables. You can't do much more than open individual 2D apps up, though. That's fine for everyday work, and Spacetop's software is aimed at business subscriptions, for people who might want to get more work space beyond their laptop screen while on the road. I could see a use for this in meetings or in situations where you'd want to be looking at something in the real world while floating windows in the air around you. That might sound bizarre, but I used the Xreal One glasses back in January to take notes on my phone while watching a presentation: my notes app just hovered off to the side of the live speakers I was in the same room with. Spacetop's little software touches are clever. A little toolbar handles app launching, and a duplicate of your laptop display rests on the bottom of the floating desktop, lining up mostly with the actual laptop display that's open. I found that I could glance around at the open floating windows and then go down to the laptop screen and adjust settings if I needed to without feeling strange. My mouse cursor came along with me, either floating in air or appearing back on the laptop screen again as needed, mostly automatically. That doesn't mean there aren't quirks: I found the pop-up displays sometimes were slow to launch or didn't launch at all, something Sightful suggested I unplug and re-plug the glasses in to fix. There's also the limited field of view on the glasses to consider. As good as Xreal's glasses are at projecting a quality OLED display in the air, the viewing area is still limited to what feels like a boxed-out rectangle in the middle of your vision. It feels like about the same dimensions as a medium-to-large monitor, and can fit a couple of windows (or one large one) into view easily, but to see the rest of the floating apps around you you'll need to turn your head around to make sure the other parts of the curved desktop come into view. The Xreal Air 2 Ultra glasses can also make your surroundings dimmer like sunglasses, or turn the glasses more transparent as needed, and they have their own speakers. The Spacetop subscription is $200 a year, on top of needing a specific pair of $699 Xreal Air 2 Ultra glasses (Sightful is selling the glasses and one year of the software together for $899). Sightful needs these particular glasses because they have full-room tracking capabilities built in, which can be used in a travel mode to make sure the floating monitor stays centered wherever the laptop is. The software also needs to run, for now, on particular Windows AI laptops with Intel NPUs. I tested on an HP Elitebook. It's hardly something for the average person right now, but it does show me exactly what I really want: ways for my own laptops and tablets and phones to work better with glasses-as-displays. I think it can happen. Microsoft, Google, and Apple are going to have to wake up and play a better part. In the meantime, Sightful's Spacetop is making some things happen on its own.

I Tried Working With a 100-Inch Display on My Nose. Here's How It Went

I'm one of the consumer PC experts at PCMag, with a particular love for PC gaming. I've played games on my computer for as long as I can remember, which eventually (as it does for many) led me to building and upgrading my own desktop. Through my years here, I've tested and reviewed many, many dozens of laptops and desktops, and I am always happy to recommend a PC for your needs and budget. Imagine this. You sit down at your computer and put on a pair of augmented reality (AR) glasses. Through the lenses, you see multiple windows: Your familiar apps and tabs are spread out before you on a big virtual canvas, and you can rearrange them or switch among them easily. Say you're working in Slack. That window could appear in the center of your vision, surrounded by a bunch of others you can check out by turning your head or glancing to the side. In effect, you've just moved your daily workflow off a small laptop screen onto a huge, customizable digital desktop that you can carry anywhere. Sound intriguing? That's the promise of Spacetop, an AR productivity solution that's just launched on Windows 11. For $899, you get a pair of glasses and a 12-month software subscription from the startup Sightful. After the first year, you'll pay $200 annually to re-up your subscription. People who need vision assistance (like I do) can order prescription lens inserts for $50, or progressive lens inserts for $150. The company used to offer it with proprietary PC hardware for early adopters as it developed the product. Now, though, you can use Sightful's solution with any AI PC, provided it has an Intel Core Ultra processor (exclusively, for now). The neural processing unit inside those chips helps run the software. How does Spacetop work and feel in practice? Here's my firsthand experience. Design and Setup: XReal Glasses and Prescription Lenses To try this all out, Sightful provided me with an HP OmniBook laptop with Spacetop installed, along with a pair of XReal Air Ultra 2 AR glasses. It's important to note that this is a review of the Spacetop software, and not the glasses per se: XReal is a separate company from Sightful, and it has produced AR products for years. But I can't ignore some critical facts: You need glasses to make the product work, the XReals are the only ones that are compatible right now, and you can't get a subscription without getting the glasses, too. If the AR hardware is required and is basically only available in one form, I have to opine on it sometime. Since I need vision correction, the Sightful team also gave me an optical lens attachment (I provided my prescription in advance), which easily pops onto the bridge of the glasses. This is a pretty neat solution for what could be a complicated problem. From there, I simply connected the glasses to the laptop with a USB Type-C cable (the port is on the end of one arm, so you can tuck the cable behind your ear) and launched the Spacetop software. The glasses feel well-made and come with a couple of nose-bridge attachments, plus the optical attachment. The outer lenses are tinted. At a glance, they could pass for real shades, though they're not as dark and are a bit thick, and the nose-bridge piece holds them farther from your face than real glasses. Attached to the backside of the tinted lenses, just beyond the prescription inserts, are a pair of smaller curved lenses that allow you to see the virtual screen before your eyes. That's three types of lenses beyond the nose rests, if you need a corrective insert like I do. The whole rig reminded me of an advanced microscope. While I prefer the glasses to a full headset, I wouldn't call them comfortable. The design fits well, and the nose pads are soft, but even at a relatively light 2.9 ounces, they weigh many times more than my normal glasses -- a lot of weight to rest on the bridge of your nose for a sustained amount of time. I recognize that this comfort level will vary by person, and I may have a lower tolerance than some. But I could only get through a half-hour to an hour with the glasses, and that's coming from someone who has worn glasses since he was about eight years old. We'll get to the usefulness of the virtual experience, but on a sheer comfort level, these types of practical obstacles make me less than keen to seek out AR and VR experiences. Again, the XReal glasses are not part of Spacetop, but you need to wear an AR device on your face to use the software. Bottom line: I don't find wearing them more enjoyable than working on a laptop in the usual way. How Does the Spacetop Experience Work? The concept behind Spacetop's virtual environment is not to translate a single virtual version of your PC's desktop onto the glasses, or to split your workflow into two monitor-like digital screens. Instead, Spacetop creates a large black digital canvas (equivalent to 100 inches) onto which you can add and move traditional windows. The desktop of your computer can be just one of several windows you see at once, as if you have one enormous display before your eyes. With the glasses on, Spacetop shows a virtual version of the laptop screen roughly in the center, but it's only one of many potential windows. I can open up, for example, multiple browser tabs as their own windows, dragging them out to the side (using the laptop's touchpad or a mouse) on the black backdrop, stacking and placing them like a gallery wall of picture frames. I can't show you precisely what this looks like in a screenshot or video, and the mock-up photos look more seamless than the reality does. During use, the windows are spread out in front of me like a big digital curved monitor, rather than truly floating in space around me like some of the renderings show -- it's a more limited field of view, even if it's still something much more expansive than a laptop screen. Getting acclimated to the environment takes a few moments, and you'll have some controls to learn. Some of these are physical buttons on the glasses that can extensively alter the experience. A button on the underside of the right arm changes the dimming level of your virtual workspace; you can black out the edges of your vision to create a more immersive display, or use a mode that lets you see some of the real world around you. That's the one to use in public. Be warned, though, that you'll mostly just be able to make out stuff in your peripheral vision. You can also look out under the bottom of the glasses to find the touchpad or one of the many keyboard shortcuts that let you manipulate the virtual workspace. Left and Right Shift together, for example, will re-center your view to the middle of the canvas in case you get disoriented, while you can pan up and down with another key combination. Tilt controls let you angle the entire experience if you're sitting in a reclined position and need to shift the Spacetop UI higher, for example. You may struggle to recall those commands and others at first, but I got familiar with the go-to combinations after a while. My Spacetop Experience With Spacetop up and running, I try to forget the moving parts and get into the experience. After a while, it becomes natural to turn my head or move my eyes to look at browser tabs, and see Spotify, Slack, and other applications spread out in front of me. Rather than minimizing and searching for the right tab, I can pull all the essentials and see them simultaneously, something I can't do on a small laptop display. My main window for typing can stay centered, with my reference materials or a video placed off to the side; I can check them at a glance, which is neat. Still, I'm not sure I want to turn my neck and head for hours, and I often want to briefly take the glasses off to glance at the laptop, talk to someone, or check my phone. A home bar along the bottom of your vision helps center your experience, displays all of the open applications, and provides quick access to settings. This process can sometimes be more awkward in AR, so having it surfaced nearby is helpful. In addition to those mentioned, you'll find a handful of other shortcuts and tricks to make your experience easier (once you're past the learning curve). You'll find more nuance here (and additional shortcuts), but I'll spare you the blow-by-blow of navigating the virtual space. For all the details, it's intuitive enough to manipulate the canvas, find and move windows, orient yourself, dim the environment, and make other changes. Sightful did decent work making what could be deeply complicated feel natural (given that you're wearing AR glasses and hooked up to a PC, of course). Beyond the discomfort and some inconveniences, my main complaint is that I don't feel like I have a whole field of vision when using Spacetop, which may again come down to the design of the glasses. I can constantly see the bottom of the built-in curved lens in my vision, which is distracting and physically disorienting, and undercuts the product's seamlessness. I continually tried to ignore this, and went about viewing Spacetop through a slimmer view box than I felt like I should. (I tried to correct this when the Spacetop team first set me up in person, but this seems to be as good as it gets; the bottom edge of the glasses never really left my vision.) All in all, the Spacetop software is sharp and reliable. It's stable, usable, and (mostly) looks clear. You'll encounter some finicky elements, but the experience is largely customizable, and some of it is down to the learning curve. If you're open to working in AR, the screen real estate alone is a huge improvement over a portable laptop, and the glasses and cable easily pack away into a bag. Ultimately, though, I simply don't prefer this setup to traditional computing. I don't doubt some enthusiast users will love it, but that's not me. (Or, I suspect, a lot of mainstream users.) The positives just can't outweigh the negatives: wearing heavy specialized glasses for an extended time; leaning on the laptop inputs to navigate the digital space; staying wired to the PC; and other inconveniences. Personally, I would be hard pressed to fire up Spacetop in public, and I don't think it fills a need. Then there's the price tag. The package has a high cost of entry (including the price of an Intel-only AI PC) and a steep annual subscription. You'll pay a lot for something that is, at times, less convenient than what you've already got. Simply put, this product didn't make me want to work in AR space for hours on end. If you know you do, or are at least willing to brave the costs to find out, this is a capable solution.

Spacetop's AR computing is a game-changer, except for one thing that may hold it back

Sightful launched Spacetop for Windows, an AR glasses and software combo, earlier this month. Packaged with XReal's Air 2 Ultra glasses, Spacetop is a piece of AR virtual display management software, designed to solve a few key pain points in the AR space. With a travel mode for better motion tracking, a mouse that can't be lost, and a massive virtual canvas, Spacetop intends to change the way we interact with AR spaces. But is Spacetop for Windows worth the steep $899 buy-in price? Let's find out. AR workspaces aren't exactly new. So what makes Spacetop different? Spacetop for Windows has a unique Travel Mode feature for a better working experience on the go. It also has a massive virtual canvas and multiple quality-of-life features like tilt mode and a mouse you just can't lose. Working in AR, especially when you're in a moving vehicle, can be a bit tricky. Just plugging your AR glasses into your laptop won't enable motion tracking, so you might end up leaving your virtual screen behind when your bus turns a corner or your plane needs to bank to avoid a bit of turbulence. And in a case like that, Spacetop's Travel Mode, with AI-powered motion tracking, can be a total game-changer. Especially because the Spacetop software doesn't display your windows on the laptop screen, allowing you the privacy to work with sensitive documents and files while commuting or in a cafe. Additionally, Spacetop's software is designed to give you a virtual 100-inch display, allowing you to work in multiple applications side-by-side. For the heavy multitasker, additional screen space is always a bonus, and Spacetop gives you more room than you'd get even with multiple monitors. You can lay out your virtual canvas however you like. But if you're worried about losing your mouse in all that canvas space, don't be. Sightful has coded the cursor so you can't lose your mouse, no matter how hard you try. Add in the tilt function to set your AR canvas at the best ergonomic angle for your current working environment, and it's a handy little piece of software. No matter how you look at it, Spacetop is an expensive piece of software. $899 for the XReal Air 2 Ultra AR Glasses and the Spacetop software is pricey. XReal's Air 2 Ultra retails for $699. The annual software renewal fee for Spacetop for Windows is $200. So, sure. The pricing makes sense. The $899 covers the software license fee and the price of the XReal glasses. However. There are cheaper AR glasses with decent displays, including most of the other glasses made by XReal, not to mention the competition like TCL and Viture. There are free alternatives made by XReal themselves (Nebula for Windows), plus Lenovo's Virtual Display Manager, and Viture's ARMoni. In fact, both Viture's ARMoni display management software supports multiple brands of AR glasses, including the XReal Air 2 Ultra glasses that Spacetop ships with. Of course, these free applications aren't quite as polished as Spacetop and lack the AI-powered motion-tracking capabilities. But for most tech enthusiasts, pricing will be a major deciding factor, if not the ultimate decision point. In that case, I just can't see a future for Spacetop outside of the corporate enterprise space. Spacetop was an ambitious project from the start, and moving to an app just makes sense given the current advancements in AI PCs. While Spacetop is currently just available on Intel's Lunar Lake systems right now, it will eventually be supported on any of the best AI PCs. The application software is stable, and clearly Sightful has spent a ton of development time fine-tuning the controls to make them as seamless as possible. I had as great an experience in AR with Spacetop as I could possibly imagine. And considering Sightful's partnership with SHI and Deutsche Telekom, Spacetop for Windows is clearly intended for the enterprise. I just cannot get past the pricing. Sure, enterprise pricing always exists in a somewhat ethereal state because the quoted price is rarely what an enterprise customer will actually pay per unit. And for corporate purposes, Spacetop is a fantastic solution. Spacetop's $899 price tag may include the XREAL Air Ultra 2 glasses, but its $200 software renewal fee is difficult to swallow. This is especially true for a regular tech enthusiast looking to get into AR computing. While other AR workspace applications may not be as seamless, they're free. If Spacetop offered universal AR glasses support, it'd help offset the software cost, but then it also wouldn't need to ship with XReal's pricy Air 2 Ultra glasses. While software devs on an ambitious project like Spacetop deserve to get paid for their time and expertise, it's a shame to lock a genuinely useful piece of software behind such a steep initial buy-in price.