Dean Takahashi tries out Star Wars: Jedi Challenges AR headset.
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Star Wars: Jedi Challenges hands-on — wielding a lightsaber in augmented reality

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

Disney wants you to be immersed in Star Wars this fall as The Last Jedi film comes out in December. And one of the ways it is doing that is with Star Wars: Jedi Challenges, an augmented reality headset that makes you feel like a Jedi.

I tried out Jedi Challenges in a hands-on demo, and it worked better than I thought it would. It wasn’t a purely gimmicky experience, the way that many AR demos feel. The product debuted on November 3 in Best Buy Stores and the Lenovo website. Disney is heavily advertising it on TV. The headset isn’t cheap at $200, so it’s an expensive toy for the Star Wars kid in all of us.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.