I Wore the RayNeo X3 Pro for 20 Minutes: Some Honest Thoughts

I compared the RayNeo X3 Pro with the Air series next to the booth that only does screen casting, and wore each of them once. The former is 8999, the latter is a lot cheaper. Same pair of glasses, where's the difference? I think I've got a rough feel for it.

First, how you put them on

The booth was crowded. My prescription isn't strong, so I didn't bother with custom lenses and just put them on. The image was a bit blurry, and the staff told me to push the glasses up, only clear when pressed against my eyes.

First look after putting them on: a colored image floats in my right eye's field of view. It's not a sticker smeared in front of you—the text has edges. Full-color Micro-LED light engine, etched waveguide made in collaboration with Applied Materials—I can't say these terms smoothly, but the feel is that the colors are more solid than I thought, the red arrows don't look washed out.

The wake word is "Hi RayNeo." I called it out, and it responded. Asked about the weather, it reported Beijing Chaoyang District as cloudy, 33 degrees during the day, 18 at night. The booth was pretty noisy, yet voice recognition actually heard me clearly—that exceeded expectations. The navigation demo had me walk a couple of steps in the booth, with arrows floating on the ground pointing the way. Walking straight was fine, but when turning, the arrows lagged a bit and needed a pause to redraw.

Where it gets stuck

SLAM drifts when there are lots of people. SLAM is the algorithm that lets the glasses figure out "where am I, which way am I facing." With a dozen people crowded in front of the booth, I turned in place, and the arrows in the view shifted by about half a body width, taking two seconds to pull back.

Brightness is also an issue. Indoors it's fine, but walking to the side near the door, with outside light coming in, the image immediately goes gray, and you have to squint to find the text.

Wearing them for a long time presses on the bridge of your nose. After twenty minutes, taking them off left two marks on my nose bridge.

This thing is better suited for B2B tours, inspections, and remote assistance teams—it frees up your hands, and the image overlays directly on the work surface, smoother than pulling out a phone. Developers wanting to try it out are fine too; the interface and AI interaction are its selling points. But forget about replacing your phone with it—the field of view is just that one patch, and the information volume can't support a full screen; wanting to wear it for long periods also needs more time, weight and battery life both need work.

The materials say it was selected for TIME's 2025 Best Inventions, went on global sale last December, and RayNeo had over half the domestic AR online market share in Q1. The numbers look good.

The 8999 buys you a frame that stuffs a full-color light engine, SLAM, and AI into a pair of glasses you can wear out. Not many have pulled this off yet, and it's one of them. As for whether it's the gateway to the "post-smartphone era," twenty minutes of wearing it isn't enough for me to judge.