You Can Put Real Money Down on Google and Xreal’s Project Aura XR Glasses

Xreal and Google’s Project Aura just got a little bit closer to reality. Today, Xreal announced, as a part of Augmented World Expo 2026 (AWE), that it’s opening up deposits for the Xreal Aura XR glasses, which it says will ship in the fall this year.

There’s no official release date or pricing yet, but you can now reserve a pair for $99 if you’re in the U.S., U.K., or Japan. That $99 deposit will get you $199 toward the final price of the glasses, though that’s including the money you already put down, so Xreal is giving customers $100 off the eventual price.

Xreal says that anyone with a launch credit will get priority shipping when Aura is actually available, too, and if you’re really committed to getting a pair of Xreal and Google’s AR glasses as fast as possible, there’s a “Founder Priority Pass.” This tier requires a $299 deposit, but for that extra money, you’ll secure launch-day delivery. There are a limited 2,000 reservations, though, so if you’re really dying to get your face behind Aura, act accordingly.

Deposits might be live, but there are still quite a few things we don’t know about hardware in the Aura XR glasses, like hard specs on the display. Gizmodo Senior Consumer Tech Editor Raymond Wong got to try the XR glasses at Google’s latest I/O developer conference and said the screen was bright and sharp, but there’s no official info on how many nits it has or the resolution.

What we do know is that Aura will come with a 70-degree field of view, a sub-95-gram weight, 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF) tracking, and Android XR, Google’s XR-focused operating system. It also requires a compute puck attachment, meaning you have to tether Aura to that in order to do anything. Official battery specs on the puck still aren’t available, but Google and Xreal are targeting about 4 hours of active use.

The good news is, given the fall launch of Aura, the rest of the details will have to come out sooner rather than later, so I guess just sit tight if you’re dying to know for sure how Aura stacks up against competition from companies like RayNeo.