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Gizmodo
12-05-2025
- Gizmodo
Spacetop Review: Working in Augmented Reality Strained My Eyes
I was first introduced to Spacetop when the company making it still believed laptops could be different. Sightful, the creators of the $1,900 Spacetop G1 promised the next evolution in laptop design wouldn't sport a screen at all. Instead, the laptop would use a pair of augmented reality glasses and a custom operating system to navigate an ultrawide AR space for your apps. It was perfunctory—and its OS seemed barebones—but I couldn't help but admire the gumption of trying something truly new in the laptop space. It's been one year since then, and Sightful—which was established by a few ex-Magic Leap developers—claims lightweight 'AI PCs' are now good enough they can support AR software natively. Whether that's true or not, and as much as I miss the self-contained G1 AR laptop, Spacetop is now a software solution. Sightful proposes AR aficionados should buy a $900 app and Xreal Air 2 Ultra glasses combo that runs on regular old Windows 11 (there's no Mac version yet). The software package offers a year's subscription to a kind of virtual pegboard in AR space where you can individually place all your windows and apps. Your laptop display will still show your desktop, but all your apps now appear in front of your eyes in AR space. Spacetop If all you wanted was a quick and dirty AR environment for your PC, it works, but eyestrain remains a lingering issue. Pros The software with Xreal glasses are good enough to read text The software with Xreal glasses are good enough to read text Software makes it easy to move around windows in AR environment Software makes it easy to move around windows in AR environment Far more innocuous than a VR headset Far more innocuous than a VR headset Cons Eyestrain becomes a big problem very quickly Eyestrain becomes a big problem very quickly Limited FOV forces you to look around more than other VR setups Limited FOV forces you to look around more than other VR setups Occasional glitches mar a seamless experience Occasional glitches mar a seamless experience Yearly subscriptions only In effect, the virtual desktop can become whatever your preferred monitor setup is. If you're somebody who codes on three vertically-oriented screens at once or prefers an ultrawide display to house multiple browsers in landscape, you can do it with Spacetop. The real question is: would you want to do it on Spacetop? If I had the choice, I would sooner work on a single monitor than strain against a screen an inch from my eyes. For review, Spacetop provided me with a preconfigured HP laptop and a pair of Xreal glasses. The software currently only supports Intel Core Ultra Series 1 or 2 CPUs, and you need at least 16GB of RAM and access to a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 USB-C port. The big problem is immediately apparent as soon as you put on the bundled Xreal Air 2 Ultra glasses. The 52-degree field of view on the glasses' micro-OLED panels is so minuscule that it forces you to turn your head completely to look at any one of your apps at a time. I can't just glance at my emails on another browser like normal; I have to wheel my noggin around, feeling like a submarine captain staring through the narrow view of a periscope hunting for the one app I need. While in the office, I do most of my work on a MacBook Pro connected to a 34-inch ultrawide monitor. Two screens are enough for my Slack feed, two large browsers, plus any other extraneous apps I need. I tried to recreate the same layout on Spacetop at home, and after two hours the inevitable eyestrain set in. I sit 30 inches away from a computer for nine hours every Monday through Friday, and I still felt more fatigue in just two hours of doing the same amount of work with Spacetop. The Xreal Air 2 Ultra allows for single-click image dimming, but nothing could fully eliminate the pressure building between my eyes. It's a typical downside of having a display right in front of your eyeballs. It's the same issue I have when trying to work in a mixed reality headset like the Apple Vision Pro. Apple's $3,500 'spatial computer' has an FOV of around 100 degrees, twice that of the Xreal Air 2 Ultra. While it's better for multitasking when you can see more of your apps at once, it will still inevitably result in eye fatigue. The Vision Pro has the capability to mirror a Mac screen in an ultrawide format that can stretch from one end of the room to the other. The Xreal glasses are much lighter and more comfortable, but still I found I would need to put them down at around the same point my head would get tired supporting a Vision Pro or Meta Quest. The benefit of Sightful's solution is it is far more innocuous than a Vision Pro when you're in a public space (although you'll be looking around so much you'll look like you're tracking a flying insect only you can see). Spacetop has other smaller issues that make it far more annoying to use than it needs to be. Every time I open up a new window—such as when I open a photo—I have to go fishing for it when it randomly appears in an open space at the top of the AR view. When I hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete, I encountered a glitch where the new window appeared on the desktop view rather than in its own window, which also made the mouse cursor disappear. Hopefully, these problems will be ironed out in future updates. Spacetop could be just another solution that's looking for a problem, but as it stands, AR is still better off for mirroring a single screen at a time. I find the Xreal Air 2 Ultra's displays are high quality enough that I had no problem reading text, and it would be a fine time watching any streaming content from the comfort of a couch. I could imagine a person on the go, whether on a train or plane, could make use of a wider canvas for their apps and browsers. Let's get even spicier. A person at work who really doesn't want their boss watching them play video games on their PC may find safety in the world of AR. I didn't have the opportunity to test how much the AR environment impacted PC performance, but you would still need a hefty GPU to run both the AR environment alongside any other graphically intensive apps. Sightful promotes some laptops like the 2024 Dell XPS or an Asus Zenbook S14 with Intel Lunar Lake chips that would work well with Spacetop. While the Xreal glasses themselves cost $700 individually, the actual software and glasses bundle costs $900, and it comes packed with a $200 12-month subscription to the Spacetop software. There is no option for a monthly subscription, though Sightful told me they were hoping to add that in the future. The lack of a cheaper subscription is a hard pill to swallow. There's less of a chance for a refund if you don't like Spacetop, and it implies there's less guarantee you'll recoup your money if the app's services ever go down. I still trust that AR glasses will improve, and perhaps with a different type of display, Spacetop's eye strain may improve. Spacetop does what it sets out to do, but in a way that leaves me desperate for a typical multi-screen experience. This could be the solution for on-the-go workers, but perhaps there's a time and place for buckling down on that work project. Perhaps you should leave the grindset at home and take that travel time to relax. The screens aren't going anywhere.
Tom's Guide
05-05-2025
- Tom's Guide
I just tried Spacetop's new AR platform with Xreal smart glasses — and it feels like the future of computing
If you've ever wanted to work at your laptop without having to crane your neck down to see the screen, Spacetop might be the AR productivity solution for you. I say that because I've been testing it for a little over a week now with a pair of Xreal Air 2 Ultra AR glasses, and Sightful's Spacetop software, which makes using Windows in augmented reality a lot more comfortable than it is by default. You might remember Sightful as the makers of that eye-catching screen-free Spacetop G1 laptop I wrote about a couple years ago. The G1 prototype looked like a decapitated laptop, with a pair of Xreal AR glasses nestled in a carrying nook where the laptop's screen should have been. Back then the goal was to design a mobile workstation that gave you all the versatility of a modern laptop with the freedom of a huge virtual canvas only visible to you via a pair of AR glasses. I tried it myself and it was neat, albeit limited by the fact that the early hardware ran on Android. In the years since I tried that prototype, Sightful has pivoted to being a purely software company that aims to sell Spacetop as an AR productivity app for Windows PCs (and one day, hopefully, Mac). In fact, you can order the software from Sightful right now as part of a $899 bundle that comes with a pair of Xreal Air 2 Ultra glasses ($699 MSRP) and a 12-month Spacetop subscription ($199/year). That's right, now it's not just software—it's a subscription-based platform, and it requires a laptop with at least a Core Ultra 7 Intel Meteor Lake CPU. Sightful claims it was always intent on being a software company, and while I'm a little sad it won't be selling screen-free laptops, I can definitely see the value in selling this software to folks who already own laptops they love. Plus, it's nice to have a screen you can switch back to if you get a headache working in AR. I've been testing Spacetop for a week or so now, and while I do sometimes get fatigued and have to take the glasses off I can generally work for hours without a problem. In fact, I'm writing this entire article via Spacetop, with my feet up on the coffee table and my head lolling back on the couch like the lazy writer I am. Is it ergonomic? Probably not. But it's a heck of a lot more comfortable than craning my head down to stare at the screen, and I think it might be my new favorite way to use a laptop. The way it works, in my experience, is that when you plug the AR glasses into your laptop you see a big virtual 100-foot "canvas" floating in the air in front of you. You can open apps and drag windows around on this canvas just like it was your Windows desktop, except it's floating in the air. So right now I have Chrome floating above my TV while I lay on the couch, and the browser is easily 4x as large as my 65-inch LG C2 OLED. The canvas itself is even larger, and extends beyond the Xreal Air 2 Ultra's field of view in every direction. My neck feels better than it ever has after a few hours working on a laptop. That alone makes me hope we're on the verge of a new way to work." Admittedly, I have to crank Chrome's zoom level up a bit to be able to comfortably read what I'm writing while it appears to be floating ten feet away. But it's an easy adjustment to make! I've also tried playing some light PC games through Spacetop, and it works well enough. When a game is in full-screen mode it just sits in a window in the center of the canvas, but if you switch it to windowed mode you can drag the game around the canvas like any other app. The scope of the canvas is defined by a grid of faint white dots that fade away when your cursor isn't nearby, so you can get a good sense of how much "room" you have to work with without being distracted by the dots. You can click and drag or use keyboard shortcuts to move the Spacetop canvas around, moving it up and down or side to side as well as closer or farther away. You can also change the angle a bit, so you can "tilt" the top of the canvas towards you if you want it to feel more comfortable while looking up or tilt it back to make the canvas stand tall and flat like a wall in front of you. At the bottom edge of the canvas sits the Spacetop launcher, a small bar that plays host to a list of open apps, a battery level indicator, the time and an app launcher—basically a truncated version of the Start menu that opens when you hit the Start button. Within that menu there's also a toggle for Travel Mode, which you can turn on if you find the Spacetop canvas too hard to use while you're in motion. So if you're on a plane or a train, enabling Travel Mode tells the software to tap the laptop's NPU and sensors to try and keep everything steady while you work. In my limited testing it works well, but I'm hoping to keep putting it through its paces in different venues and vehicles to see how well Spacetop can improve on the default experience of plugging a pair of the best smart glasses into your laptop. But of course, what's nice is that you can just close the Spacetop software if you'd rather go back to the default "desktop hovering directly in front of your eyes" Windows AR experience. There are some good reasons to switch it off sometimes, too. While I think Spacetop improves on the baseline Windows AR experience in key ways, most notably by letting you lean your head back while working, there have definitely been times when I would trade the extra space of the Spacetop canvas for the reliability of having my desktop hovering right in front of my eyes no matter how I move my head. And of course, I'm not happy that you have to pay $200 a year to use this software. That makes sense for a business ordering this stuff in bulk, but as an individual I'm not sure it's really worth the price unless you plan to spend a lot of time working in AR. But Sightful is clearly making a play to put Spacetop into workplaces worldwide, starting with the U.S. and Germany. The company has worked with Intel, SHI International and Deutsche Telekom to fine-tune its software and start rolling it out this year, with plans to expand to more countries throughout 2025. After only a few weeks with this software I'm still not sure I'm ready to make the switch to working in AR full-time, but I can already see the benefits—and I think my eyes are starting to get more comfortable working for hours in the Xreal glasses. While my eyes are adjusting to the strain of AR, my neck feels better than it ever has after a few hours of working on a laptop. That alone makes me hope we're on the verge of a new way to work—you might look goofy in AR glasses but believe me, your neck and back will thank you.
