Xreal, the Chinese XR company formerly known as Nreal, debuted its Air 2 Ultra AR glasses at CES 2024 this week in Las Vegas, with the $699 item scheduled to ship to U.S. buyers in March, crowding the February 2 release date Apple just announced for its $3,500 Vision Pro mixed reality headset. Though currently aimed at developers, who can preorder now, the Air 2 Ultra will be available for purchase online from Xreal to anyone in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and the UK, in addition to China and the United States.

Packing more features than the $399 Air 2 model released late last year, the Air Ultra is being marketed as a full-fledged “spatial computing” device, with “positional (six degrees of freedom, or 6DOF) tracking in Xreal’s typical sunglasses-style form factor,” reports The Verge, noting “that makes them ripe for not just watching TV or playing flat-screen games on a projected screen but also running immersive AR apps, which is exactly what Xreal hopes developers will do with them.”

As with Xreal’s other Air models, the Air 2 Ultra “projects a floating image in front of users’ eyes, but it adds dual 3D cameras — one on each side of the glasses — that can map the wearer’s environment and enable special features like hand tracking,” allowing developers to create apps that combine physical and digital spaces, advancing it beyond a straightforward display medium, The Verge explains.

“The Xreal Air 2 Ultra introduces a titanium ring frame, setting it apart from conventional AR glasses and merging fashion with functionality,” writes VentureBeat, noting the device features “dual 3D environment sensors equipped with computer vision capabilities for accurate location tracking within a 3D space.” The sensors provide “3D mesh creation, semantic scene understanding, and future AI capabilities, providing developers with a canvas to explore new spatial computing experiences.”

The Air 2 Ultra “isn’t an all-in-one standalone package however,” Road to VR says (in an article that includes a handy specs chart), pointing out that they are “slated to tether to Samsung S22 and S23 for AR stuff, and to iPhone 15, or any Mac or Windows machine that can run Xreal’s Nebula launcher.”

In news release, Xreal founder and CEO Chi Xu says the Air 2 Ultra platform provides “an affordable and lightweight solution” that allows developers “to jump into the exciting world of spatial computing and create the next generation of mixed reality experiences.”

At CES 2024, the seven-year old company (which began selling product in 2020) announced that it has “shipped up to 350,000 AR glasses” to date, citing IDC figures that gave it 51 percent of the global AR segment in Q3 2023.