Here are the 3 Google I/O 2026 Android XR smart glasses announcements I’m hoping to see
Here are the 3 Google I/O 2026 Android XR smart glasses announcements I’m hoping to see
Publish Date: 2026-05-18 19:00:00
Source Domain: www.techradar.com
Google I/O is less than a day away, and the annual software showcase would be the perfect opportunity for Google and its partners to showcase their 2026 Android XR tech: the XR glasses we’ve been promised will land this year.
Google isn’t a stranger to smart specs, but since the rapid rise and fall of Google Glass, we’ve seen the likes of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses take the smart specs world by storm, and now the old king wants his crown back. But with Google taking a software-centric approach — letting others handle the hardware — it makes sense that this new generation of smart glasses would land at a software show like I/O.
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Let’s get Xreal
I love Xreal’s specs, and have done for a while — if you want a pair of XR glasses you’ll struggle to beat the Xreal One Pros. So I’m especially excited to see the final version of its Project Aura Android XR glasses, and they’re also the pair we’re most likely to find at Google I/O (because unlike Samsung, Xreal doesn’t have a high profile tech events of its own in the calendar).
The big difference between Xreal’s Aura glasses and some other AI smart glasses we’ve been seeing is they’ll be wired. This matches Xreal’s XR approach with previous models and offers some design advantages, but also some constraints.
With no internal battery the Project Aura glasses should feel lighter and less bulky, but they’ll need to run from a connected device (in Aura’s case that’s a dedicated compute puck that doubles as a trackpad and a battery pack) plus they’ll be best suited to stationary activities (working, and watching TV) rather than using them…
