Nreal is adding Steam streaming to its AR glasses
Chinese augmented reality company Nreal is launching a Steam beta on its Nreal Light and Nreal Air AR glasses, letting users stream games from a PC to a virtual big screen. The company says its beta will go live at the end of June, coinciding loosely with a June 27th hackathon designed to attract AR developers with $100,000 in cash prizes. The move could expand Nreal’s software ecosystem and offer more to do in a pair of surprisingly good — but still limited — early AR glasses.
Nreal suggests the Steam beta could be finicky, admitting in a press release that it “requires a bit of setup effort and is not optimized for all Steam games.” It will join the option to stream Xbox Cloud Gaming titles through Nreal’s Nebula platform as well as a variety of streaming video apps. Nreal touts the beta as compatible with Dirt Rally and the Halo series. It promises users will see their games on the equivalent of a 200-inch HD screen.
Nreal’s Light glasses, which rolled out first in Asia before launching in the US last year, are designed to be plugged into a Samsung or OnePlus Android phone. They’re less full-featured than high-end business-focused headsets from companies like Magic Leap and Microsoft, but they’re also far more affordable at $599 and support relatively advanced features like AR anchoring and hand tracking. (The Air glasses are a lighter but more limited set of smart glasses designed for streaming video.)
But there’s also a limited amount of content that takes advantage of these features, and in the US particularly, the Nebula platform launched without support for popular streaming apps like Netflix — requiring users to watch videos with the less convenient Android app mirroring system. Nreal’s AR Jam development
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