I'm watching the Jets lose again. Typical Sunday. This time, as I stare at where my TV is, I don't have to bother anyone else with my suffering. My kid is watching Adventure Time on our TV, but I'm floating a larger virtual TV over my own via the Xreal One glasses I'm wearing, which are plugged into my phone and streaming Paramount Plus.I've wanted VR to become something like "headphones for our eyes" for years. Way back when I wore the Avegant Glyph, a headphone-like pair of portable displays, perched over my face, I saw my fantasy of a personal portable movie theater become real.Tech's been improving for face wearables by leaps and bounds. VR headsets are already great, but Apple's Vision Pro reached a high point for visual fidelity. Apple's mixed-reality headset is, first and foremost, a wearable display for my Mac and my work, and for movies. But the Xreal One, a $500 pair of display glasses that anchors monitors and movies in front of me (I can turn my head and what I'm looking at stays put), is the closest I've come to display headphones for my everyday life. I've been wearing a pair with prescription lens inserts for about a month now, and I just love them.I'm not saying glasses like Xreals are for everyone, but they're now a useful portable display in my life for gaming, movie-watching and getting work done. Connected to my MacBook Air, using a curved extended monitor mode, I can extend my workspace surprisingly well -- and then pop them in my backpack. 7.9 Xreal One $499 at Amazon Like Sharp display, vivid color Improved audio Onboard chip pins displays in space, helpful for comfort Works with many USB-C devices Don't like Glasses fit still can be awkward Needs tethering Lenses are bulky, prescription lens inserts jut out Design doesn't eliminate bright daylight or reflections Tethered glasses done wellThe Xreal One isn't a pair of everyday glasses. They're glasses-shaped displays. While there are lenses you can peek around, the top halves of the glasses are angled prisms reflecting displays embedded in the top of the frames into your eyes. They look weird at first glance, and perch a bit more off your nose than everyday glasses. But they fold down like glasses and are stored in an included hardshell case easily.These aren't wireless, either. You tether the Xreal One via a USB-C cable (it's included) to whatever device you'd like: Android phone, iPhone, iPad, laptop, Steam Deck and so on. They all work. While tethering is annoying, it also means these glasses are treated as a plug-in display by all sorts of stuff, just like a monitor would be. They work when tethered to an iPhone 15 Pro. Any USB-C video-out works. You mainly get a mirrored display, but videos and movies play in a larger format. Scott Stein/CNETBefore I could use them, I had to get a pair of prescription lens inserts added. If you've used another pair of Xreal glasses like the Xreal Air 2 Pro (which these are better than, by degrees), these are made similarly, with the same angled "birdbath" display prisms. The lens inserts attach differently, though: Unlike the last model, the thin lenses and their metal bridge snap into small holes under the glasses (you have to pull out little rubber covers with a paper clip or pin). It's awkward and far less simple than the snap-in lenses from VR headset manufacturers.The prescription lenses "float" off the glasses. It's fine when wearing, but looks weird. They push up against the folding glasses' arms a bit when they're tucked away into the hard case. I feel like it's something delicate I need to take care of. Xreal One with prescription insert lenses added: they snap in like a floating pair of mini-glasses. It looks weird, works pretty well, but it's not ideal. Scott Stein/CNETBut the glasses themselves feel solid, rest easily on my face and have three different-sized nose pieces for fit. The arms also click into different angles to fit different heads and ears.A series of buttons on the right arm control glasses features. There's a toggle for screen brightness, and a button next to it swaps between anchored display mode and a free-moving mode that follows your eyes. If you double-click that button, you get deeper glasses settings. On the top of the arm, another button can be programmed as a shortcut for certain modes; I set mine to switch between regular display mode and a wide-screen mode for my laptop when I press and hold. The Xreal One next to Xreal Air 2 Pro glasses. Which is which? It doesn't matter, they're so similar in frame shape and lens design that the feel is nearly the same. (The Xreal Ones have better audio and video features, though.) Scott Stein/CNETThese buttons can feel fiddly, and there's no touchpad on the arm for easier navigation. You need to dig into some settings modes to control the glasses further, which involves a series of double-clicks and button presses to navigate.But the rest is simple: Plug the USB-C cable into the glasses, connect to your device and you're basically good to go. Watch this: Our Smart Glasses Future, According to Xreal 09:16 Video and audio is better than ever for glassesI've been really impressed by the Xreal Ones in nearly every situation I've used them in. The 1080p display is lower-res than I'd prefer (compared to the Apple Vision Pro, at least), but it's good enough to make movies and games seem crisp. And even my laptop screen in normal mode is readable enough to write, work and do everything else I need. I'm actually writing this review while wearing them.The Micro-OLED display's brightness and contrast are generally really good and colors are rich, and that's where I appreciate these glasses the most. They make movies feel nearly as enjoyable as watching on Apple's Vision Pro -- or at least good enough that I'd prefer using them at home over a regular TV. A close look at the Xreal One lenses (without prescription inserts). They're still chunky birdbath-style, angling the micro OLED displays from the top of the frame. The glasses can dim to three levels of transparency, too. Scott Stein/CNETThe downside is the transparency of the glasses, especially in daylight. Much like the previous Xreal Air 2 Pro, these glasses can auto-dim at three levels to turn them into sunglasses, blocking the outside world. Not fully, though: In bright rooms, I can still see things bleed through. My peripheral vision remains open, which is great for awareness but bad for immersion.Because of the angled prism displays, there's also some reflection. I can sometimes see reflections of my shirt up on the glasses if I'm in a well-lit room. Maybe it's also because of the extra layer of prescription lenses I have popped in, but dark rooms are best to appreciate these glasses for movies. (I've been watching David Lynch's Inland Empire at night as I lie in bed, and it looks great.)The audio also sounds good. Bose-powered over-ear speakers ambiently pump in sound, similar to Meta's Ray-Bans, and the audio finally feels good enough to make a movie feel rich. People around me can hear the audio leaking out, though, so it's useless on a plane, but you could always pop in noise-canceling earbuds and use them at the same time as the Xreal One (my preferred solution in public). The audio is, in general, much better than the previous Air 2 Pros. Watch this: Best AR and VR Devices of 2024 04:57 Anchoring displays and widescreen mode make a big differenceThe Xreal One's big advantage over the last Air 2 Pro model, besides audio, is a new X1 chip that can pin displays in place. This means that when you move your head, everything can stay still if you want. This three-degrees-of-freedom head movement support was previously only possible with a separate plug-in device called the Beam. Now, anchoring what you see works with whatever video source you're plugging into.That's huge, to me, for things like working on a computer. If I'm just watching a video, then having the display essentially glued to my face is acceptable. But if I'm floating a laptop monitor, I want to sometimes look at different parts of the screen easily. I move my head when I work.It's also helpful for my phone: I tried floating a display during a VR/AR conference at MIT, and could anchor the mirrored phone screen to the side of the presenter, allowing me to thumb-type notes and watch at the same time. The Xreal One (left) next to Apple Vision Pro (right). The Xreal One is far smaller, and a lot less expensive. They're tethered display glasses, not a sensor-equipped mixed reality standalone computer, but they often serve a similar movie-playing purpose. Scott Stein/CNETA new ultrawide mode also expands the display area up to a simulated 310 inches (according to Xreal), effectively spreading a longer curved monitor around you, similar to how the Vision Pro does with a connected Mac.It's not exactly the same. The viewing area is constricted to a 50-degree field of view -- about one standard laptop monitor's view and it's in 1080p resolution. But if you move your head from side to side, you can see all the rest of the curved display real estate, like other open apps, for instance. In practice, it works a lot better than you might think, and it lets me work on my laptop more efficiently on the go. It's very close to feeling like a private personal large monitor without carrying an expensive and bigger Vision Pro.The Xreal One can also move the projected display distance closer and further away, and expand the display size even larger than the field of view area when not using the ultrawide modes. Connected to a Steam Deck, I found it fun to play in a zoomed-in mode. It made the display seem bigger and more immersive, even when I couldn't see every part of it at once. I want the Vision Pro to evolve into something small like the Xreal One. Different idea entirely, but as a wearable display, a sign of the future. Scott Stein/CNETThere are glitches, thoughDevices don't always work perfectly with connected display glasses. For example, iPhones and MacBooks and most other devices turn the Xreal One into a mirrored display, but some apps break the connection. ESPN, for some reason, wouldn't let me stream an NFL playoff game because of "screen sharing," although I could connect with Disney Plus and stream the same game just fine. Viewing the Max streaming service, I found that my phone screen's timeout would break the streaming of the show, and I had no way of overriding it. Sometimes the display would act oddly, not showing the mirrored monitor, and unplugging and replugging it again would fix the issue. Often my phone or laptop would ask if I was plugging in headphones. Basically, my devices didn't really know what the heck this Xreal One was.These glasses are great most of the time. But it's just a reminder that Xreal is doing behind-the-scenes magic to make them work with all sorts of devices that technically don't recognize them for what they truly are.Android XR, Google's glasses and headset-friendly OS promised this year, could begin to make Android phones work even more seamlessly with glasses like the Xreal One. Xreal is an Android XR partner, but it's unclear what will really happen to evolve these glasses further.A plug-in camera, sold separately, promises to make the Xreal Ones an AI-enabled pair of glasses -- maybe similar to Meta's Ray-Bans, but in a tethered display glasses form. But again, Xreal hasn't made any moves showing how that would work and what it really could do. The Xreal One in its included hard case. It's pretty easy to fold down and take on a trip. Scott Stein/CNETWait for the Xreal One Pros?Xreal has another pair of glasses coming this spring, a Pro model that's $100 more but has a flatter set of display lenses and a wider 57-degree field of view. I've tried them, and the projected displays can seem even bigger. I think I'd want to spend $100 more and get those if I was already spending this much on high-end display glasses, but since I haven't deeply tested them yet, I can't really tell.Still, it's amazing how far this tech has come. The Xreal One glasses aren't perfect, but they're the best set of display glasses I've ever seen. They make me forget about using the Apple Vision Pro more often than I'd ever have expected. I grab whatever's closest to me and easiest to use, and the Xreal Ones are a cheaper, smaller, device-friendly and still high-quality set of displays. They may not enable VR or AR, but they are the sort of headphones for my eyes I've dreamed of for years. They're coming with me when I travel, which the Vision Pro never does. The future is small, and the Xreal One glasses show where things could be heading.