Nreal CEO Chi Xu interview: Advancing AR’s future, one step at a time

If you follow the dollars from major technology companies and cellular carriers, it’s clear the consumer electronics world is betting augmented reality will be one of the next big things: Google has invested in everything from Glass to Magic Leap, Microsoft put most of its chips on HoloLens, Facebook is planning an all-day AR wearable, and Apple’s AR hardware project has been an open secret for years. But each company has struggled to come up with an actual product consumers want to use and wear in public — and can afford.

Nreal doesn’t have those problems, at least not to the extent of its rivals. Instead of making a $3,500 visor-slash-computer for enterprises or a $2,300+ standalone computing platform, the company created Light, a $499 consumer AR headset that looks like a pair of sunglasses and relies on an Android smartphone for most of its processing. Rather than trying to solve every possible AR problem in a first-generation device, CEO Chi Xu seems genuinely happy and excited to be polishing Light for a second-quarter 2020 consumer release — all while looking forward to inevitable future improvements. The goal, he told VentureBeat in an interview at the start of CES, is to get first-generation hardware into consumers’ hands and start collecting real-world feedback that can be used to continually improve the experience.