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Google's answer to Meta's smart glasses has a price, a date, and a clear target. The Xreal Aura, the first wired glasses built on Google's Android XR platform, went on sale on October 28 at a launch price of $1,099 — a deliberate undercut of Meta's comparable Ray-Ban Display product, which sells for $1,499. According to reports from Thurrott and Make Tech Easier, shipments begin in mid-November, and anyone who preordered at the original higher price will be refunded the difference automatically.
What the $1,099 actually buys
The launch price covers the 12GB RAM and 256GB storage model, and it holds only through December — the standard price is $1,279. A higher-end 16GB/512GB version is discounted to $1,299 through December, down from its $1,499 standard price. Orders opened in the United States, Canada and South Korea, with Japan following on November 2 and wider availability planned for 2027. The Aura was first shown as Project Aura at Google I/O earlier this year, and it arrives alongside a GameSir controller with a dedicated Gemini key and a portable wireless keyboard.
Why the glasses weigh under 95 grams
The trick is a split design. The glasses themselves weigh under 95 grams because the heavy work happens in a tethered compute puck that carries the battery, Qualcomm's Snapdragon Reality Elite chip, a trackpad and a fingerprint sensor. The lenses are transparent, hiding Sony Micro-OLED displays that deliver 1200p resolution at a 120Hz refresh rate, with a 70-degree field of view and electrochromic dimming that darkens the lenses to make virtual screens easier to see. Bose tuned the open-ear speakers, and the glasses support hand tracking, prescription lenses and three nose-pad sizes.
What you can actually do with them
Because the Aura runs Android XR, it can run regular Android apps in flat or immersive modes as well as apps built for Samsung's Galaxy XR headset, arranging them across up to five virtual screens. Plug a laptop, phone or handheld console into the puck's USB-C port and its screen can be mirrored inside the glasses. Google's Gemini assistant is built in, able to answer questions about whatever the wearer is looking at, and Google says more than 150 experiences made for XR will be available at launch, including immersive films and a spatial version of Google Photos.
The bigger contest behind the price cut
The $1,099 launch price is the story as much as the hardware. Meta has defined this category so far, and Google and Xreal are pricing aggressively to buy their way into it — even at the cost of refunding early preorder customers. The risk for buyers is the usual one with first-generation devices: a wired puck is a compromise, and the ecosystem of 150 XR experiences is small next to a phone's app store. But as a statement of intent, the Aura is hard to miss: Google is treating glasses, not phones, as the next platform, and it is willing to compete on price to get there. Whether Meta answers with its own cut will be the next move worth watching.
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