Viture Pro XR Glasses Review

Watch your movies on a big screen without needing a big screen? Over the years we’ve seen an explosion of all kinds of head-mounted displays offering the personal viewing of games, VR environments, and movies. Some have worked well, others have had subpar video, sound, or were uncomfortable to wear, or too large to take with you. Now, there’s a clever product from Viture, the Pro XR glasses that might get you that home theater experience on the road, on the plane, or even in your favorite chair.

The Viture Pro XR Glasses will let you watch a movie via a file or via streaming in a full 1080p at 4000 nits of brightness that appears as big as a 135” display at 120Hz. The glasses themselves are only a little larger than standard sunglasses, and won’t cause a scene on an airplane. Even better, they feature Sony Micro OLED panels and they feature adjustments so you won’t need prescription lenses to watch. The sound is stereo, with the audio system designed by Harman.

One big feature is that the glasses support 3D for native 3D films, and surprisingly, the Viture glasses simulate 3D that looks about 95% as good as ‘real’ 3D, using AI to create the 3D effect in real time.

If you love movies and have a decent home theater, you’ve no doubt thought about taking your movies with you. Yes, you can watch on a laptop or a smartphone, but somehow those devices just don’t capture the magic of a large screen, and they can be awkward to use on an airplane or other mode of travel.

I’ve spent a lot of time with the Apple Vision Pro, and it is a superb way to view a movie, and it can be a better immersive experience than a lot of home theater setups. It supports 3D if that is your thing, and the audio is pretty good.

So, here’s a pretty reasonable alternative. The Viture Pro XR Glasses are a fraction of the price of the Apple Vision Pro, support native Side-by-Side 3D, and can create 3D from 2D sources. You’ll find a lot of Side-by-Side 3D videos on places like YouTube and other destinations on the web.

To look at the Viture Pro XR Glasses, you’d think they were simply sunglasses, maybe a little thicker than what you’d see on anybody’s head.

The glasses are well made, with a full-metal aircraft-grade aluminum body (with titanium hinges). They can be used on a variety of platforms, including iOS and Android phones, Macs or PCs, and tablets.

The glasses come with nose clips to fit just about any face, and there’s even a clip, so your hair won’t get tangled in the glasses or the single USB-C cord that connects to your device.

There is a diopter adjustment that will get the view in focus if you are normally a glasses wearer, and there are buttons on the underside of the frames for volume, brightness, color temperature, and 3D on or off.

The Viture Pro XR Glasses come in an attractive box that unfolds to reveal the “getting started” instructions.

There’s a nicely made carry case that will do a solid job of protecting the glasses, cable, and the previously mentioned nose clips.

And there’s a USB cable. One end is a magnetic connector that attaches to the right side of the glasses, and the other end is a standard USB-C cable to connect to your source.

Since I’m a Mac guy, I tried the XR Pros with my Mac laptop, my iPhone, and my iPad. It’s possible to connect to older Apple devices with Lightning connectors, but you’ll have to purchase an adaptor. Since the glasses look like an external monitor to all these devices, you’ll be able to view content right out of the box. But if you want special features, you’ll want to install the apps for Android, iOS, Mac, or Windows devices.

I installed Spacewalker on my iPhone and Mac. On the Mac end, there’s an additional app called Immersive 3D.

It’s important to get the glasses sitting correctly on your nose, so the bottom or top of the screen is not cut off. The included 4 nose pieces should get that sorted for you. If you are near-sighted, there are diopter adjustments on the top of the frame, one for each eye. I feared I’d need to invest in prescription-ready inserts, like those required by Apple for the Vision Pro, but I was able to match my eyes and the glasses, and everything was very sharp.

I started my visual adventure with my MacBook Pro laptop. I connected the glasses to one of the laptop’s USB-C ports with the included cable.

Since the Mac saw the glasses as an external monitor, an icon popped up on the menu bar asking if I wanted to see a full screen mirror or an extended desktop. I chose full screen mirror. At this point, I didn’t need to do anything else, if I played a movie from whatever app (Netflix or Amazon Prime for example) the movie appeared. It’s a good idea to set that app to display full screen. YouTube videos looked good as well.

The fun began when I ran the Spacewalker app. Once again you get options for how your screens display, like a single screen or multiple displays. If you select multiple displays, it’s like having multiple monitors. But for this review we are going to stick to movies.

Once you launch Spacewalker things get interesting. The Pro XR Glasses render realistic 3D from any source.

I found a YouTube HD clip from ‘The Searchers’ with John Wayne in HD. The movie was NOT shot in 3D, but with The Spacewalker software running it looked like excellent 3D. The glasses are using AI in real time to render depth and it works! I tried some other things on YouTube and was happy with what I saw. Even news programs and interviews benefitted from the depth.

I got the same results on Netflix and Amazon Prime. The movie ‘Hunter Killer’ looked like a commercial 3D release. Shots of the CGI rendered submarine gliding through the water and later firing torpedoes simply looked great, much better than I expected and frankly better than some of my older Blue-Ray discs that had ‘fake’ 3D.

To me this is a visual game changer. It was good enough to watch movies on the equivalent of a 135- inch screen, but it was really a leap to watch 2D movies in really good 3D.

To try and judge the virtual screen size I saw in my living room about 12 feet from my 55-inch flat screen. The Viture screen in that setting was around twice as big as my real screen. Apparent size will vary depending on how close you are to an actual display, but it’s safe to say it was a lot bigger than my living room setup.

It’s hard to convey how good the image is on the Viture glasses. I got a camera in close using macro mode to get a shot of one of the 2 screens, but reflections made it difficult. It really didn’t begin to show how good the video is.

Let me also note another good advantage of the Pro XR Glasses, and that is having 2 people watch a movie at once. It requires the purchase of one additional piece, called the Pro Mobile Hub.

With that, you plug it into your device, and you get 2 USB C outs that can handle 2 Pro XR Glasses. It’s $129.00 and worked just as expected, without dragging down video quality or the 3D effect.

Viewing the AI generated 3D is a really good experience, but every so often the system would be fooled, and a tree that was supposed to be in the background rendered to the foreground, but that was a rare glitch. Most of the time, the Pro XR Glasses just worked.

I also tried some movies from Movies Anywhere on my iPhone that I had downloaded as a bonus with purchased physical media. They played great too and were even better quality than streaming media.

I watched ‘First Man’ the movie about Neil Armstrong’s trip to the moon on my iPhone. It was an immersive experience. This is really excellent for travel by plane or train or bus. No Internet connection is needed, so bring some movies along and have at it.

A word about sound. The Pro XR Glasses have a sound system provided by Harman. It’s certainly OK, but home theater mavens will find the sound a bit thin. There is good separation, and even a hint of surround, but the sound quality doesn’t match the picture quality. On the other hand, you can use earbuds instead, or even good quality headphones. Then you are coming very close to a home theater experience with the glasses providing a big screen.

The glasses don’t support 4K videos while the pricey Apple Vision Pro does, but text on screen is very readable, and even plugged into my Mac I could write this review looking through the glasses.

This is a hard one. If you value watching movies on a big screen without having a big screen this is a high value item. You can watch on a phone or a laptop. I’m discussing it mainly as a movie viewer, but it works well plugged into a laptop if you want to work on a large monitor and you don’t have one. I used it with Photoshop and some other graphic intensive applications, and it was great to use. You can also set up multiple monitors. One could be the movie you are watching, another could be your mail, and still another could be a browser. This is a very smart device. At around $400.00 it’s not a snap purchase, but in many ways it’s a more portable way to watch movies than the Apple Vision Pro which cost around 10 times as much.

You’ll need other accessories if you want to watch with a second person, but that’s something the Apple device can’t do at all.

The Viture Pro XR Glasses aren’t a toy. They display quality video, and I think are great for taking a trip or even sitting around the house and watching a movie. The software will take a little getting used to, but the smartphone app is very clever, and you can move your phone as if it were a pointer and select some pre setup destinations like news broadcasts or Netflix or Amazon Prime or youTube. Watching a movie is a good experience, and you can control how close or far you are from the screen and even select an environment outside the screen that will not be distracting.

The AI created 3D is really the impressive thing here. As a long time, 3D watcher of movies, and having a projector in my home theater I have a good idea what good and bad 3D looks like.

In probably 95% of the cases the 3D comes off looking like native 3D, and that is a small miracle. Even your non-3D movies come off looking like 3D movies.

There’s not a lot of actual 3D to watch. The glasses require SBS format (side b side) and there is material to watch even on YouTube, but chances are it’s not going to be something you would choose to watch if it wasn’t in 3D.