RayNeo Air 2s and Pocket TV review

Introduction

RayNeo is one of the major players in the AR glasses space. The brand belongs to the TCL family and its Air 2s glasses we are looking at today are an iterative update over the RayNeo Air 2 with much of the same base specs.

Before we start we should probably clear up some terminology here and explain what the RayNeo Air 2s glasses actually do. You might find them being marketed as XR glasses, which stands for Extended Reality and is actually an umbrella term that encompasses all VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality) and MR (Mixed Reality) products. At their core, the RayNeo Air 2s are more or less a portable, wearable display. There is no actual computing on board, but there are some sensors, including accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer and proximity sensor.

The RayNeo Air 2s has a whole set of new optional accessories, including the Pocket TV, which we also have in our review kit. It is actually a full-fledged Google TV companion device that brings much-needed smarts to the RayNeo Air 2s. We will be going over the Pocket TV as well.

RayNeo Air 2s at a glance:

• Dimensions: 6.9 x 6.07 x 1.86 in (175 x 154 x 47 mm), 78 grams (without Type-C cable attached). 3-position vertical adjustment for gaze angle, 30-degree adjustable angle range hinges, 3-level nose pad adjustment.
• Optical parameters: Two Micro-OLED Displays with 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution in 2D mode, 3840 x 1080 pixels in 3D mode, 46-degree FoV optics, up to 120Hz, 8-bit color, 108% sRGB, up to 600 nits perceived brightness (5,000 nits display brightness), 10-level brightness adjustment, effective screen size: up to 201-inches, projected 6 meters away.
• Audio: Four speaker design with two openings on each arm.
• I/O:USB Type-C port for power and video over USB Type-C alt mode Display Port, menu button and volume rocker on the left side, brightness rocker on the right side.
• Other features:Accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, proximity/wear sensor, 3 DoF head tracking, myopia attachable frame and additional nose clips in the box.

As mentioned, the RayNeo Air 2s and RayNeo Air 2 are very similar devices. Both seem to still be selling from the official store concurrently. Feature-wise, the two are identical and the RayNeo Air 2 glasses are even a bit lighter at 76 grams. However the S version brings a new design, namely a more comfortable weight balance, helping with prolonged wearing. The new weight distribution is 46.7% to 53.3%. The clamping force of the arms has been reduced by 15% for enhanced comfort as well.

Unboxing

The RayNeo Air 2s glasses come in a rich retail package. They ship in a pretty large box that is thick and nicely protective. Beyond the glasses, the package also contains a nice thick USB Type-C to Type-C cable, angled on one end for a more convenient operation.

RayNeo also provides a carrying case for the glasses. It is high-quality and very sturdy, with a zipper and soft velvet on the inside. There is enough space in the box for the glasses and the USB cable, which covers the basics required to run the glasses.

Also in the box, we found an additional nose pad, insert templates for prescription lenses and a microfiber cleaning cloth.

Hardware, features and controls

The RayNeo Air 2s glasses have this Ray-ban-reminiscent design, which is definately a good thing. However, the front semi-transparent darkened shade is not removable, but since we never found a situation where we would rather have more transparency it’s not a major omission.

The glasses weigh 78 grams, which is not the lightest for XR glasses but is far from heavy. As mentioned, one of the major upgrades to the Air 2s is the improved 46.7% to 53.3% weight distribution. In practice, we comfortably wore the glasses for a couple of hours at a time, enough to watch a movie. The main discomfort we felt was to the nose bridge, which is understandable. Still, the nearly perfect half-and-half weight distribution helps a lot, and we have to say that the RayNeo Air 2s are some of the most comfortable XR glasses we have tested. The reduced clamping force of the arms helps as well.

The 175 x 154 x 47 mm dimensions of the glasses are reasonable. Sure, you’ll never quite look or feel like you just have regular glasses on, even chunky ones, but we still think TCL did a great job keeping things as slim and compact as current tech allows.

The RayNeo Air 2s glasses offer plenty of adjustments. You can adjust the position of the nose pad by pulling it out or pushing it in. There are three positions available. You can also swap the default nose pad, which is marked as a “medium,” with the included “large” one if that is more comfortable for you personally. Both nose pads have plenty of padding and air and are well designed to handle the weight of the glasses.

Since, like any other XR glasses, the Air 2s rely on angled projection to get the image in front of your eyes, vertical alignment will always be somewhat of an issue. In order to address this, Air 2s glasses offer vertical angle adjustment for the arms. You get three positions to experiment with to fit the image full in your plane of view.

The RayNeo Air 2s glasses must always be attached to the USB Type-C cable via the tip of the right arm. The glasses themselves have no computing or actual power, for that matter. It all comes through the USB port, so you can’t realistically expect to be very “stealthy” while actually using the device. The USB Type-C to Type-C cable provided in the box is angled on one end to fit more snugly on the glasses. You can use any decent cable of your own, but the provided one is pretty great. It is soft and flexible, yet very sturdy, without being too thick. It never gets in your way while wearing the glasses.

We appreciate the Type-C connector and its solid physical connection. There is pretty much no chance of accidentally yanking the cable out of the glasses. However, that also means that if you happen to get entangled, you are likely to yank the glasses themselves off of your face. A magnetic connector would probably be better in this regard.

As for cable length, we never needed more than the provided one offered. It is long enough to be comfortable while sitting in front of a device or holding it in your lap, and it even reaches most pant pockets if you really feel like walking with the glasses on.

RayNeo is particularly proud of the speaker system on the Air 2s glasses. There are four speakers in total on the glasses – two on the left arm and two on the right. Output grills are pointing up and down.

TCL says that the speakers bring a 100% volume increase. We found the speakers pretty adequate, but nothing to phone home about. Mids come through sounding quite clean, which is important for things like dialogue. Highs frequently get distorted at higher volumes, and there is barely any bass.

You probably won’t want to crank the speakers too high since they can get uncomfortable listening to and potentially bother any nearby people. Having said that, the Air 2s glasses have something called Whisper Mode 2.0. It promises that there will be no sound leakage at 20cm distance from the speakers, even at 50% volume.

You don’t get many actual physical controls on the Air 2s. There is no myopia adjustment or anything of the sort. The only way to dial in focus is through physically adjusting the glasses on your face. You do still get a volume rocker and a multifunctional functional button on one of the arms and a brightness rocker on the other.

The rockers and buttons are pretty small but perfectly functional, clicky, and have nicely tactile feedback. We have no complaints there.

The only other visible I/O on the glasses is the wear sensor above the nose pads. It works quite well, and we have no complaints about it consistently.

Modes of operation and features

The RayNeo Air 2s glasses work directly with almost every device that supports DP output over USB Type-C Alt mode. There are two optional adapters for extra connectivity options. One is called the “adapter,” receiving and converting wireless casting signals into the glasses. It is particularly suited for Apple and other non-DP devices. RayNeo also offers an “HDMI” adapter. That simply takes in an HDMI signal from something like a game console, converts it, and sends it to the glasses. This one is wired. There is also the RayNeo “JoyDock” that is specifically meant to work with the Nintendo Switch. It replaces the Switch’s default dock and has an onboard battery to prolong gaming sessions.

Then there is the RayNeo “Pocket TV”, which we do have in the office alongside the glasses and will be taking a closer look at in a bit. Simply put, it is a standalone device running Google TV that is meant to hook up to the glasses.

The RayNeo Air 2s have one “primary” mode of operation. You just hook them to a source and get a static image projection in front of you (something like 130 inches at a perceived distance of around four meters). The image “follows” your head movements, though without any tracking. It just stays centered in your line of sight.

Then there is the RayNeo XR Android app. You can get it on the Google Play Store only in supported regions, but others have the option to sideload it. The XR app is not much to look at on the phone side. It offers a trackpad for input on the display, alongside a home button and also leverages the phone’s accelerometer to spawn a spatial pointer controller inside the Air glasses interface.

RayNeo XR app

The RayNeo XR app spawns something called the “RayNeo XR space”. It offers a 3 DoF head-tracking home screen experience alongside a few apps. Most notably, a “spatial” web browser and a YouTube player. The main UI is well laid out, and there are plenty of convenient recommendations for 360-degree spatial videos to play from YouTube.

Speaking of playing back spatial videos, the RayNao XR app handles these somewhat oddly. It is kind of hard to explain, so it is best to check it out for yourself. Still, instead of placing you directly “inside” the video, the player spawns a flat viewing surface in front of you, like a screen, allowing you to move your head around to achieve 3 DoF tracking within the video, as expected. It’s a bit of a weird effect, and we don’t particularly like it.

It is also worth noting that while all of the basic features like multimedia playback, a browser, and even a games section are covered, the RayNeo XR app is a bit light on additional features. Namely, the thing we are missing is the ability to stream third-party VR content to the glasses which is something XREAL’s competitor does have. We admit it is janky at best, but it is still there and allows playing back VR experiences and simple VR games from a PC to the glasses greatly improving their versatility.

Another feature we missed is the ability to play 180-degree SBS videos on the glasses with proper tracking. This seems to be absent both with the RayNeo XR app and the optional Pocket TV accessory, which is a shame.

Compatibility

All the glasses really require to work is a USB Type-C port with USB alt-mode support for Display Port output. The glasses themselves are not too power-hungry, so most devices don’t struggle to power them on.

What does that mean in real-world terms? Let’s start with laptops since they are easier to sum up. You are ready to go if your laptop supports DP alt mode over USB Type-C. This should be listed on the laptop’s specs sheet since those tend to be well-detailed. We tried on a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9, an ASUS Zephyrus G14 from 2021, and an M1 MacBook Air successfully. A weird list for sure, but it illustrates the main point – if you have DP over Type-C, it will work.

Things are a bit messier on the phone side. Now that the latest generation of iPhones has switched over to USB Type-C, the RayNeo Air 2s glasses have no issues working with them. So, if you have an iPhone 15 – you are all set. Technically, however, beyond that and with no additional accessories, the RayNeo Air 2s glasses are an Android-only accessory.

Some Android devices support Display Port over USB Type-C, but there is no easy way to know which ones. A good rule of thumb includes that it is generally a flagship feature and that you should have better odds with devices from Samsung, Huawei and OnePlus. Once again, you need to search around to see if your phone has DP over Type-C. In terms of phones, we succeeded with a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.

As mentioned, RayNeo offers two different adapters that can connect to other unsupported devices. For older Apple tech, there is the wireless Miracast adapter; for wired HDMI connectivity, there is the “HDMI” adapter, so most bases are covered.

We also did some testing on our own and we found the Nintendo Switch does not work hooked up straight to the glasses. You need the additional JoyDock accessory or the HDMI adapter to connect to the Switch. The Valve Steam Deck, which supports DP over its Type-C port, just works by being connected straight to the glasses. The same goes for the ASUS ROG Ally.

Performance and power consumption

The RayNeo Air 2s glasses have Full HD 1920 x 1080-pixel optical resolution with 8-bit colors. You also get 46-degree field of view, which is pretty standard and 600 nits of advertised perceived brightness. That’s pretty high, as far as XR glasses’ brightness goes. TCL says that the Air 2s can do up to 201 inches of virtual display, but we believe that refers to the 3D mode with head tracking. In the regular “static” image mode, you are getting more in the ballpark of 130 inches.

Unfortunately, since the displays on the RayNeo Air 2s are not traditional in any way, we can’t put specific numbers to their performance characteristics.

We have to say that the displays look great in person. They can get very bright, almost uncomfortable, and the colors are very nice and vivid. The only real issue we have in terms of optics has to do with display positioning. The projection sits too high in our field of vision, and we constantly find ourselves pushing our glasses down to see the bottom edge of the display.

You also have to get used to the fact that you are constantly seeing the outside world, at least to some degree. Still, we would say that the brightness is enough to make the glasses usable in pretty much every environment. Higher brightness levels can be fatiguing for some people. After all, the displays are very close to your eyes. The RayNeo Air 2s glasses advertise TUV Rheinland certifications for low Blue Light emissions and Flicker-free, though.

The RayNeo Air 2s glasses operate at 60Hz when in standard “direct streaming” 2D mode. Once you involve the RayNeo XR app and its 3D mode, you can enable 120Hz refresh rate, which is great for certain Android games. However, we wish there was a way to get 120Hz working in the other mode for things like game consoles.

Pixel response time is very good. There is little input latency, too. We managed to game on the RayNeo 2s, playing a few platformers requiring reasonable jump timing precision with no issues.

On the topic of image clarity, we should note that the mage, as we already said, looks very crisp and sharp in the regular “direct streaming” 2D mode. However, in the 3D mode inside the RayNeo XR app, things can get quite blurry, especially while in motion. The finer text is pretty hard to read, as well.

Since the RayNeo Air 2s glasses are entirely powered via a Type-C port, one of the few actual tests we managed to run on them was to measure power consumption. With a fairly static image on the screen, like browsing or working, they drew around 1.5W – 1.6W, depending on the brightness setting. While playing a video with sound, the glasses used between 1.6W and 2.0W. All pretty impressive numbers.

In more practical terms, watching a two-hour movie from Netflix on the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra with the RayNeo Air 2s on ate up around 32% of the battery, which is perfectly reasonable.

RayNeo Pocket TV

The RayNeo Pocket TV is an optional accessory for the RayNeo Air 2s glasses that adds more smarts to the glasses. It is basically a self-contained “smart box”, running Google TV with a pretty large 6,500 mAh battery on board. The Pocket TV is slightly smaller than a modern smartphone at 130 x 61 x 23mm (5.1″ x 2.4″ x 0.9″) and weighs 205 grams.

Controls on the Pocket TV are laid out like a big TV remote. The center “wheel” is not a wheel but a simple directional pad with a button in the middle. It works quite well for navigating the Google TV UI, but the buttons are a bit mushy and squeaky, which can become annoying after a while. That said, you are not meant to be clicking them all that much, just to navigate to your content of choice. The button with the rocket ship is also a user-programable shortcut.

RayNeo Pocket TV

The Pocket TV does have a microSD slot for storage expansion, which is great to see to augment the onboard 64GB of eMMC storage. There are two USB Type-C ports on the bottom of the unit. The left one is for charging. Power Delivery is supported, which is welcome. The right port is the device’s sole video output. It outputs PD over USB Alt mode. We tried hooking it up to a regular monitor with a Type-C port, and it works. We are not sure if that is convenient for anyone, though. A regular HDMI of some sort would have been greatly appreciated since that would have upped versatility a whole lot.

The Pocket TV isn’t particularly powerful. In fact, not at all. It is powered by an Amlogic S905Y4 chipset with four Cortex-A35 CPU cores and a Mali-G31MP2 GPU. It is paired with 3GB of RAM, which is decent for a Google TV device. Plus, you get fairly modern Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, which is also great.

Pocket TV hardware info

The Pocket TV and its chipset do a pretty great job when it comes to hardware video and audio decoding, which is arguably what counts most in this case. You can see a full list of supported codecs below. It is important to note that the Pocket TV does support HDR10+ and Dolby Vision decoding, plus DTS and Dolby Audio. However, the RayNeo Air 2s glasses do not have HDR support, which means you can only get SDR video passed on to them.

Codec support

On a more positive note, the Pocket TV does have the highest possible Google Widevine L1 DRM certification, allowing apps like Netflix to saturate its FullHD resolution with matching stream resolution.

Widevine L1

The Pocket TV also has plenty of picture settings to play around with. You can adjust the resolution scale for the entire UI and scale down the image size to 80% of the original, which does help mitigate the whole issue with the bottom of the picture frequently being cut off because of how the optics are aligned.

Picture settings

You can’t explicitly force the Pocket TV into 120Hz mode, but you can have it match the on-screen refresh rate for when you are playing high refresh rate video, for instance. And since the Pocket TV doesn’t really have any power for gaming, you are likely to be perfectly fine with the default 60Hz the rest of the time.

It is important to note that the Pocket TV can only operate in the standard “static” 2D mode of the glasses. That means there is no head tracking of any kind, as you would get from the RayNeo XR app. Honestly, we prefer it this way since you get much cleaner and sharper text and images. However, don’t expect to be enjoying any 360-degree or 180-degree SBS videos on the Pocket TV. Just regular “flat” 2D media content.

The Google TV UI is very clean and straightforward. It has many similarities to Android TV but focuses more on content, smart aggregation, and recommendations. You still get access to all Android TV/Google TV apps through the Google Play store, which is great. That covers all of the major streaming platforms and all other basic use cases, like good local video players, file browsers and even some advanced apps like HTTP and FTP file servers for easily getting content to the Pocket TV. You will probably be doing most of your navigation with the buttons, though the Pocket TV has integrated 9-axis IMU sensors, so you could also use the air mouse feature. There is an integrated microphone and Google voice assistant, too.

Google TV interface

Finally, we did an impromptu endurance test on the Pocket TV. The manufacturer claims that it should be able to do nine days of standby, 7 hours of continuous “use”, whatever that refers to and 5.5 hours of video playback. In our testing, we got closer to 4.5 hours of high-quality video streamed through Plex. By the way, the four-light array in the top right corner also indicates the battery level.

Should you get a pair

The RayNeo Air 2s glasses retail for $400 from the official store. Currently, that includes a free Miracast Portable Adapter, which is the thing you need to attach older Apple tech or desktops wirelessly to the glasses. You can also get a bundle with the Pocket TV for $540 or one with the JoyDock for the Nintendo Switch for $460. All of those sound fair and competitive in the current XR glasses landscape.

We definitely enjoyed our time with the RayNeo Air 2s glasses. Their image quality overall, particularly brightness and sharpness, seems to be a neck above competitors we’ve tried from the likes of XREAL. The Air 2s glasses are also quite comfortable and well-designed.

In terms of things we didn’t like or felt were missing, display vertical alignment seems to be our biggest issue. It can be somewhat mitigated by crushing and molding the nose pads aggressively, but even so, the image seems to be projected just a bit too high for our taste, frequently cutting out the bottom of the picture. Also, we would have loved to see a way for devices other than smartphones with the RayNeo XR app and the Pocket TV to access 120 Hz mode. For instance, we loved the Steam Deck plus glasses combo, but 120 Hz would have made that so much better. And speaking of advanced use cases, we would have loved to see a way to stream PC VR content to the glasses, even if it’s janky like what XREAL has. Playing back 180-degree SBS video content is also a sore omission.

All things considered, if you prioritize image and sound quality in a pair of XR glasses, then definitely consider the RayNeo Air 2s. However, if you are looking to tinker and go in deeper with things like advanced playback of 3D content or even rudimentary VR, then we would probably nudge you in another direction at a competitor that has slightly more mature software features in that regard. If you decide to go for a RayNeo Air 2s pair, do yourself a favor and consider the $140 extra for a Pocket TV. It really does make using the glasses a whole lot better and more convenient.