What about some technical info?

I am trying to understand the limits in VR capability of the Air 2 Pro.

It doesn’t seem to have the inside-out cameras, but to support any of the functionality that is supposed to be available with the Beam (arriving late…), I’d guess you’d have to include

  • gyro(s) for the position of the glasses vs. Earth center of gravity
  • accelerometer(s) to gauge the speed of the head spinning, but also perhaps to dampen external motion e.g. on trains
  • magnetic compass, as additional helper to calibrate the gyro(s) and do some sensor fusion

in the headset.

That’s pretty much what my LeEco Le Max2 has and partially augments with its LeVR headset (better gyros), which isn’t truly great for VR, because that doesn’t integrate the camera (actually covers it up!), but if you’re not too sensitive to VR sickness, it’s actually better than not having VR at all.

You wouldn’t want to walk around with it, but for stuff like a flight or car sim as well as surround 360° video, it’s quite ok.

Your SDK seems to have been aimed at the Nreal Light, so whatever clues it provides for sensors and capabilities won’t be much help for the Airs, I guess: I haven’t really tried to dig in and read the code yet, because I’m not sure I’ll want to keep the Air 2 Pro, if it is really offering nothing but a portable screen, without much “augmentation” or “mixed reality” (it doesn’t help that desktop work, which requires sharpness across 100% of the screen real-estate, fails because of IPD mismatch the outside edges are always blurry to one eye).

At the moment the only use case left for the Air 2 Pro would be watching movies, including in 3D (but those are becoming rarer) in trains or planes with better privacy than a laptop/tablet screen. And that’s a little too little for the price of a tablet.

Especially when my Lenovo Mirage Solo was half that price.

Actually there I am still planning to test if I my Asus convertible laptop allows me to use the screen and touchpad with the schreen folded down (“reverse tablet” mode might not be supported). If the IPD issue could be overcome, that would make a difference!

Bad news on the making the Asus convertible work in “display-less” mode, that is with the screen folded to the bottom and trying to use the keyboard and touchpad with the Air 2 Pro as sole display…

The keyboard and touchpad are turned off, while the touchscreen on the back is probably lit and ready to be touch on principle: it seems quite simply a configuration not foreseen by Windows or Asus, even if the sensors in the convertible should be able to identify if the screen is facing up or down.

Of course you can always just keep the screen upright and off, but that’s not nearly as cool… and requires some interactions to do. Then again, even with Gorilla glass, putting it face down on a tray in a train or plane, may not be for everyone.

Good news on the quality of the sensors: they seem to be truly excellent as the Beam demonstrates. Unfortunately that cannot be said for the Beam itself, please see my other post there.

Urgently waiting for Nebula for Windows to make the device more usable there.