Nebula for Windows and Mac removed from Homepage: That means you need to refund!

Nebula
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I’ve just seen that Windows and Mac support has been removed from the home page.

Nebula is currently listed as an Android-only fature and a completely different beast (a new walled garden that nobody needs) than Nebula for Windows and Mac.

That seems to imply that you have given up on making the glasses work with Windows and the Mac, even if you have not announced that.

But Mac and Windows support is what you advertised and what we bought them for: it makes it an incomplete delivery, a violation of contract and you’ll have to fully refund everyone.

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I’d like to think there may be other reasons, the most obvious being that Nebula has never made it out of beta and it is a more transparent way to market a product not to draw on beta features, but that development will continue in the background.

That said Nebula for Mac is not my primary use case so I only occasionally use it, however trying it when I saw this post it is only opening to a white screen. I have tried disabling and re-enabling screen recording for Nebula and no change. I am currently on Sonoma 14.2.1 though I have a nag to update to 14.3. I don’t remember the version of Sonoma I was running when I last used Nebula, but no app or firmware update is being offered.

I hope support is not being dropped as while this is not the reason I bought the glasses, but it is something I use when travelling. It is a game of cat and mouse for the devs I imagine; Apple releases security updates regularly and while Nebula is not doing anything nefarious it does make use of intercepting the screen, which is an area Apple naturally has to protect from malware, which I could see as a drain on the dev team.

Could someone from XREAL comment on the situation please?

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I probably should have tried a bit more troubleshooting before I posted. I just downloaded Nebula for Mac and replaced the version I had manually. Note the Windows version is still listed as coming soon on the download page.

It did a glasses update that had a bit of tank about it, failing the first time, completing but reporting a fail the second, but then it launched to triple screen view. Unfortunately the three displays were all just empty desktops and when I clicked on Safari (which was already open) so I could come back here to reply it fails to a state where the left and right eye get a different image and the mouse pointer is not visible.

I just tried one last time closing Safari (and all other apps already closed) and entering Nebula AR display. I am now replying on one of three Nebula screens.

I don’t have my Beam handy to see if that has an update, and if it will update the glasses when I use them with it. Nebula and Beam each applied an update after the other was last used last time I successfully used Nebula. I believe this was an issue at one point with the Air glasses that I was fixed by the time I bought a Beam, however it has done that since I received my Air 2 Pro glasses.

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Hi fen. If you get a white screen after launching the Mac Nebula, please try the 72Hz mode. Also, go to the Settings–>Desktop&Dock–>enable the ‘Displays have separate Spaces’.

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Yes, the Windows version is still listed as “coming soon” when you navigate from the Air 2.

I made the mistake to chose “support” from the primary navigation and then “Nebula”: there only an Android was to be found, which is functionally something completely different.

But whether XREAL-dev is extremely curtious not to contradict me or discurtious for ignoring my posts is hard to tell.

Ultimately being clear and open in their communication would have avoided past grief and would also do well for the future.

Beam and Nebula still keep overwriting each others firmwares, at least on my Air ² Pro.

Even a QA with a team size of 1 should have been able to fix that by now.

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Hi, abufrejoval. I want to clarify that we have never engaged in false advertising, whether you believe it or not. The Nebula for Windows can be found at this link Nebula for Window V0.7.0 Released! - #3 by koustourika, while the Nebula for Mac is available for download from the official website.

These versions are still in beta because we believe more AR functions need to be added. Our development team is working on expanding the software’s compatibility.

If there is a contract that we have violated, please let us know. Our return policy is clearly stated on the page, and users can return the glasses within 30 days.

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I surly made a mistake in trusting you’d deliver working software before I came back from Christmas vacation.

I won’t repeat the mistake of trusting you.

And yes, I have tested that release intensively, as my posts in response to that post will attest.

And those tests have revealed that the current state of the beta is unusable, quite independently of how much hardware you throw at it: not even an RTX 4090 will do.

I bought a package that consists of various pieces of hardware and software. The hardware came in two deliveries, the working software part is still missing.

So in my book the delivery is not complete and the 30 day return window has not even openened.
But your “return policy” isn’t the governing law on this sale.

Your support staff has gotten cute and argues a) that no Windows support was ever promised and b) that a beta delivery doesn’t imply that there will ever be a working product.

If I distribute those mails, I’m sure that won’t be good advertisement for your company.

False advertisement:
These glasses were evidently designed as mixed reality devices and originally named so. There is plenty of evidency on this forum for this “renaming”.

Now mixed reality is very vaguely defined and can mean pretty much anything. So had you stuck with that term in the marketing materials, you wouldn’t have raised false expectations, I’d have never bought the glasses and everything would be fine.

But you did introduce augemented reality and virtual reality as features and part of the product.

Those have very clear minimal criteria, which these glasses do not meet.

They fail on augmented, because the reality isn’t transparent enough even for sit-down work, let alone for walking around without killing yourself.

And they fail on virtual reality, because there is no working software on Windows and MacOS.

Those terms are not up to you or your sales people to define at will, they have established semantics, “disruptive dialectics” cease being “smart” when courts find them misleading.

And that is quite simply false advertising, because you do not deliver on both ends.
And it’s breach of contract, because you never delivered the full product yet refuse the return.

Legal stuff:
Products sold from your German web site to EU consumers fall under EU and German consumer protection law. That law overrides whatever vendors might put into “sales contracts” when it violates unalienable consumer rights.

And an incomplete delivery is a breach of contract, that any “30 day return policy” cannot overrride.

The unconditional return obligation is only 14 days in the EU, but that only applies after a full delivery has been received.

Your liability for damages in case of a partial delivery and your obligation for a full refund are six months.

Judging by the rate of progress in the software, you won’t be ready will fully functioning software by May 2024 and the damages are mounting.

You have to have a representative to sell products in Europe, please name that representative so I can sue you if you continue to refuse a full refund. If you do not comply, the extra legal effort for identifying and pursuing that person will be added to your liability.

If you sell in the EU, you have to respect EU law, it’s that simple.

Just like people who sell in China have to respect Chinese law.

If you violate that, you’re not only risking having to pay eventually. You’re risking having any future at all in a market that seems to have been important enough to invest into (unfortunately rather misleading) local advertisement and a distribution channel.

Consumer protection in the US seems rather weak in comparison. But that market does not tolerate misleading products, either. And if you ever want to be big, what you’re doing here would surely result in a class action suit or two.

Just imagine Apple doing what you’re doing and take the proper path.

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Hello, we have thoroughly tested the Nebula for Windows and it is compatible with RTX 4090, and many other users tested and worked well. I’m not certain if you have reviewed the guide I included in the previous message, or if the current functionality does not meet your needs. Regarding the return policy, I believe we need to clarify the “incomplete delivery” issue you mentioned. Please review the private message I sent to you, which contains additional details.

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I have not seen any positive reviews of the Windows Nebula app on this forum: perhaps you can invite those many users who judged Nebula well to report their experience and setups more completely?

BTW I haven’t seen positive reports from Mac users, either: perhaps you should encourage them to report their positive experienes, too?

It is “compatible” with any non-hybrid GPU that I’ve tested with, but that just means it displays something.

What makes it unusable is the fact that the content is refreshed at several times a second or stop-motion speeds when you move your head e.g. between the virtual screens and that any text content of these screens is washed out to the point where not even the largest letters are readable.

I’ve carefully read and followed the document or guide included in the package posted.

I’ve quite literally spend days testing the Xreal glasses on three beefy workstations, a gaming NUC and various laptops. And I am an IT technical architect who runs IT research labs for a job with more than four decades of experience and who’s built most of his personal computers since 1984.

I still make mistakes, obviously, but very few survive for days and weeks.

The functionality advertised is one to three side-by-side screens (or a wide curved one) projected into a virtual space of selectable size and position and visible from within the glasses which give you the impression and use of such extra screens for desktop work, media content and even gaming.

All games I tried simply crashed Nebula, but for me that’s not even an important use case, because I have real VR headsets for that.

My main use case is very undemanding 2D desktop work like surfing and document editing. And that is quite simply impossible because the refresh rate of the virtual screen setup is so low and the content of the screens is washed out.

It’s much better on the Beam, albeit with only a single extra screen and the complexity of having the extra device in between.

But even there the quality suffery very badly if WiFi transmision is used (WiFi 6 over the 5GHz band with iperf reporting better than 1.2Gbit/s bandwidth with WiFi-6 clients–so it’s not my WiFi that limits the quality, but the Beam).

And it’s still inacceptably bad when using the Alt-DP USB passthrough on the Beam, because text is blurred to the point of unreadability when you move around your head at normal speeds, e.g. to look at different paragraphs, text columns or side-by-side windows.

And even the new 90Hz mode of the Beam doesn’t improve that in any meaningful way.

This is the content from your private message:

Hello abufrejoval. I apologize that our glasses and software do not meet your needs. I see that you mentioned our return policy. I want to clarify that we allow returns within 30 days of purchase. Unfortunately, we cannot accept returns for products after the 30-day period. We appreciate your understanding on this matter. If you still wish to return the glasses and receive a refund, please provide me with your phone number so that our manager can discuss your request with you directly.

I fail to find any additional details in that message: could you explain?

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If you don’t understand the concept of a “Beta” software, go buy Apple.

Blockquote
Legal stuff:
Products sold from your German web site to EU consumers fall under EU and German consumer protection law. That law overrides whatever vendors might put into “sales contracts” when it violates unalienable consumer rights.

As someone working in sales for an IT vendor in the EU, I can confirm that you have no idea what you are talking about. Go to the Konsumentenschutz and let them handle this thing if you think you have a case here. Or even better, throw your money on an attorney and let him handle the case - should be no problem to get your money back if you win, right???

Hör auf dich mit Halbwahrheiten zu blamieren und verwechsele nicht Höflichkeit mit Dummheit!

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Frankly, it doesn’t work on any of 4 android devices with USB-C port that I own either.

It is the only version that works for me (windows 11 and android user). I just wish I could also use it wirelessly with Beam.

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And you would be using Nebula how?

What’s your setup and what are the results?

If you’re happy to buy “beta” cars, houses, fridges or computers that cannot drive, be lived in, cool or compute, please enjoy your life to the fullest.

I’d much rather get what is owed to me or be reimbursed.

And if you’re not using Xreal glasses, please don’t waste everyone’s time getting involved in a subject where you just do not belong.

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Try mobile OnePlus works perfectly, so do many Samsung and other phones, you can also purchase a Beam - Nebula is released for mobile and not for desktop.

For desktop use direct connection WITHOUT Nebula - works great. If not, buy the Beam adapter.

YOU bought a Beta product - it’s clearly stated that Nebula is Beta, and you bought a functional hardware that works OOB. Beta means NOT released!

And I’m getting sick of people buying the newest VR/AR gear and complaining that it doesn’t work according to their expectations.

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I am currently on a laptop with the following (relevant) configuration:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800H with Radeon Graphics 3.20 GHz
RAM: 16,0 GB
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3060
XR: xReal Air 2 Pro

I am running Nebula for Windows v0.7.0 on Windows 11 and have 3 virtual FHD screens through A2P while the middle one can go up to 4K. Just like their front page shows, only screens are curved instead of angled. While I agree it is currently quite buggy, it CAN be usefull once you figure out the quirks. With some polishing regarding stability I can totally see the potential.

Hopefully some base API could exposed for community to further develop.

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I have Samsung S23 Ultra and A71. It doesn’t work with A71 at all and I can only use DEX or screen mirroring on S23. I’m not buying a third phone just because of Nebula for Android. Nebula is not released for Android - it is only released for some Androids. I can’t even download it from the play store.

I have Beam but it’s not much more usefull to me other than for positioning the mirrored screen.

But you only get one screen mirrored or extended like with S23U, so it’s just about 1/3 as great.

If that was meant towards me then I am not sure you read my note carefully enough to correctly understand. Goes straight with your suggestion on buying Beam which I said I already have, but seemed to have missed your attention. On the other hand, if I bough something from a company which does not care about their user’s feedback, that’s their last thing I bought, and has nothing to do with what works how and what not.

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Try mobile OnePlus works perfectly, so do many Samsung and other phones, you can also purchase a Beam - Nebula is released for mobile and not for desktop.

If you had made the effort to read before you wrote, you’d have noticed that I have left very detailed reviews for all of these scenarios all across the forum.

Out of the 5 (five) OnePlus phones I own, only one works with what they call Nebula for Android.

But that software shares only the name with the desktop apps, none of the functionalities. And it quite simply doesn’t do anything useful, because it only supports apps written for their proprietary eco-system, none of my normal Android apps like Firefox, Outlook, Office, Teams etc.

I own various Android VR headsets including a Lenovo Mirage Solo fully Google DayDream qualified device which fully supports normal and VR apps and shows how easy that is even with much older hardware (a Snapdragon 835).

And it’s rather telling that “AR-space” launched as “MR-space”, showing that the headset was in fact designed as a mixed reality headset, while it is being sold as an augmented reality headset.

And those two are quite simply not the same, AR and VR have well defined qualities Xreal’s product does not meet.

For desktop use direct connection WITHOUT Nebula - works great. If not, buy the Beam adapter.

A bought an augmented reality headset, which includes a crucial software component to create the augmented environment, not just a passive head-mountable display: they are quite simply not the same thing.

Following your logic that’s pretty much like saying I bought glasses and if I turn the device off, I can still see some of my surroundings and therefore I got a functional product: very expensive sunglasses!

You might even argue that the glasses can still serve as a fashion accessoire as depicted on the home page with all these beautiful models standing together (to avoid tripping over things?) and doing nothing remotely IT related.

I don’t know if you work for Xreal and pose as a satisfied customer, but your exercise in dialectics cannot change the fact that Xreal doesn’t deliver a product that works.

And I did buy the Beam adapter, which delivers a third use case, but one that is still seriously flawed, as per review in the Beam section.

YOU bought a Beta product - it’s clearly stated that Nebula is Beta, and you bought a functional hardware that works OOB. Beta means NOT released!

According to my long and detailed testing the product that I received doesn’t even qualifies as Beta, just as not delivering at all on the described functionality. It does not at all conform to the product described and ordered.

The product that was and remains advertised is not advertised as non-functional or Beta, but an augmented reality headset that allows to project up to three additional PC screens in a virtual space that can be fixed around you (VR aspect) and allows you to continue to use your normal screen or interact with your normal environment where those monitors are not projected (AR aspect).

And until that product is delivered in full, Xreal has not fulfulled the purchase contract and are liable for a full return. That’s quite simply the law.

YAnd I’m getting sick of people buying the newest VR/AR gear and complaining that it doesn’t work according to their expectations.

I cannot say that I much care for your feelings. Nor do they matter.

Xreal is misleading potential customers into buying an augmented reality headset, but cannot or do not deliver. And then they leave customers who were generous enough to believe that their promises of a production ready software component “real soon now” would actually fall within their self declared 30 day return window, in the rain with an unusable bit of hardware and a €600 bill.

That is both immoral and illegal and they need to return the money and change their behavior.

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Thanks a lot for your post!

On my high-end system (RTX 4090) the middle one goes to 4k, because my physical display is 4k.

But it then makes the additional two display right and left automatically 1920x1080, which just doesn’t make any sense at all, since you view all screens through the same device.

Correcting the resoutions and DPI settings is tough, because Windows only gives a couple of seconds before reverting to the old settings and it just takes too much time for all those display negotiations to finish to find and hit the “confirm” box.

And of course it doesn’t save those preferences and restarts with the 4k central screen every time.

For me that’s another Nebula bug.

I still doesn’t change that moving your head between the virtual screens completely obliterates all screen content to some blurry mess, that takes hundreds of millisecond to settle into something you can read again, once your head stopped moving and even on the most powerful hardware.

And that effect make it impossible to replicate the extra productivity you gain from a physical multi-monitor setup, where you can instantly switch between different visual contexts.

And the brain effort of trying to focus on that blurry mess and turn it into something readable is extremly tiring, making and productive work impossible.

I ordered a tool to augment my computer with virtual displays with the ability to change the level of transparency on the fly (Pro edition).

And I’m less convinced than ever, that Xreal the company, their hardware and their software will ever actually fulfill the potential you evidently still see.

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Right. I have mentioned somewhere before that since those extra screens are virtual and you need to turn your head to see small parts of the desktop, I don’t see any reason why they should be limited to FHD. I’d keep that as the recommended option since that’s the physical resolution as well, but it could go up to virtually anything, neither 4K nor 8K should be the limit. If I have the rendering capability to use 2x4K+1xFHD hardware screen, that’s equal to 9 FHD screens of pixel real-estate. I can’t position them in space with my hardware, but it would be great if I could place all those virtual monitors all around my rotating chair, especially if in addition to that the resolution wasn’t limited to just FHD. Now imagine three rows of screens all around yourself, if you have the rendering capability. I think that should be very much doable.

That being said, some minor flickering when moving around is tolerable to me. If it flickers, then this means at least there is something there to flicker :smiley: I’ve noticed that by adjusting some magnification and distance settings can help for start.

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I’m rarely against being given choices.

Having bigger or different virtual screeens in your setup may make a lot of sense, just as it might if they were physical. E.g. I can think of having THD sideview screens and a larger central upright. I was just complaining that the [hard/impractical to change] default seemed based on my physical screen setup and that didn’t make sense.

And the fact that actually using those extra screens for flicking between them (like I would on a physical setup) didn’t work because the virtual content took to long to rebuild. Just to give one example: since I type very fast, cut&paste actions e.g. for programming are often just visual, instead of actually cutting and pasting I’ll just type in the copy, especially if it’s more about copying the syntax and there is a transformation e.g. in the actual name of arguments. But if switching between screens takes too long, my mental paste buffer runs empty before the switch is complete. And since the programming itself is already keeping the brain busy, any additional mental strain just kills the value proposition.

BTW: Xreal finally refunded the purchase in full, after far too much of a discussion, but nevertheless. I guess they decided they’d rather have more satisfied customers than dissatisfied ones and along that path I wish them well.