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This tiny tablet is a smart upgrade for AR glasses

It’s cheap, pragmatic, and a bit clunky.

It’s a dedicated Android machine that won’t cannibalize your phone’s battery life, using a custom AR launcher and featuring some unusual hardware elements, particularly a pair of cameras for recording stereoscopic 3D video. From there, you can control your experience by pointing the Beam Pro at icons like a remote and tapping the screen, or — for Xreal glasses that come with built-in cameras, including the Air 2 Ultra — making gestures with your hands. Countless consumer AR startups have been launched since the early 2010s, and most have either folded (like the non-Mark Zuckerberg Meta), been acquired by a big company for a nebulous future product (like the now Google-owned North), or pivoted to a purely business-focused model (like Magic Leap).

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