Is £749 Too Much to Pay for a Pair of Gaming Glasses?
Wearable tech has had a rough few years when it comes to living up to its own hype. Gadgets promising to replace your phone screen have tended to arrive overpriced, underpowered or both, and most end up gathering dust in a drawer within a few months.
Against that backdrop, Asus and Xreal teaming up on a pair of gaming-focused smart glasses might not sound like the most obvious route to success.
Except the ROG Xreal R1 are now actually available to buy, rather than just being talked about at a trade show, and the specification sheet suggests the two companies might have found a niche.
What You Actually Get
Strip away the marketing and the R1 is really just a very good portable screen that happens to sit on your face rather than a table. It uses Sony’s micro-OLED panels, running at a 240Hz refresh rate with a claimed 0.01ms response time and 3ms motion-to-photon latency, numbers that matter far more to competitive gamers than to anyone just wanting to watch Netflix on a flight. That combination gives you what’s effectively a 171-inch virtual screen at a resolution of 1,920 by 1,080, with a 57-degree field of view, alongside sound tuned in partnership with Bose.
On paper, at least, it’s built for people who care about milliseconds, not just megapixels. Whether 240Hz actually makes a visible difference through a pair of glasses, as opposed to a proper gaming monitor, is something reviewers are still working through and it’s fair to say the jury is out until more people have had one on their face for an extended session. What isn’t in doubt is that this is a considerably more serious specification than the AR glasses that have come before it, most of which topped out at 120Hz, so those that care about such things will be paying attention.
@tomthetechchap 177” 240Hz Gaming Glasses! 😎 (ROG XREAL R1 First Look) Would you game with these?? #xreal #rog #ces2026 #gaming #rogxrealr1 @ROG Global ♬ Beat Hip Hop Melody Sampled – AvikTheCria
One of the more sensible parts of the design is the ROG Control Dock, which comes bundled with the glasses. Rather than being locked to a single source, the dock lets you switch between three connected devices at once, using two HDMI 2.0 ports and one DisplayPort 1.4 connection.
That means you can, in theory, leave a PC, a PlayStation and an Xbox all hooked up simultaneously and flick between them, rather than crawling under a desk to swap cables every time you fancy a different game. It is a small thing, granted, but it’s the kind of detail that suggests this was designed by people who actually game.
The Price Question
This is where things get more complicated. In the United States of America, preorders for the R1 went live at $849, which is a full $200 more than Xreal’s own One Pro, a similar pair of glasses that shares the same 171-inch, 1,920 by 1,080 virtual display but caps out at 120Hz rather than 240Hz.
UK buyers have been able to preorder through John Lewis at £749, with stock estimated to start shipping around the middle of July. That is a lot of money for something that, however impressive the specification sheet reads, still can’t do everything a good gaming monitor can.
Not gonna lie…I really want the just announced ASUS ROG XREAL R1 glasses. 240hz micro OLED? Yes please! pic.twitter.com/SPGLCRWxs5
— BMFVR (@bmfshow) January 5, 2026
What you are paying for, in fairness, is portability. The ability to plug in and get a genuinely large, fast screen wherever you happen to be, rather than being tied to a desk, is something worth splashing out for to many.
For anyone who travels a lot and doesn’t want to be stuck with a laptop screen, or who simply doesn’t have room for a proper monitor setup, that trade-off might make more sense than it does for someone gaming from the comfort of their bedroom. As always, the individual use case will be the thing that decides whether or not it’s worth it for you personally.
Worth It, or Just Expensive?
The honest answer is that it depends entirely on how much you value not being tied to a single television or monitor. As a piece of engineering, doubling the refresh rate of the previous generation of AR glasses whilst keeping the same screen size and field of view is a genuine step forward, with the multi-device dock being a thoughtful addition rather than an afterthought.
As a purchase, £749 sits somewhere between an expensive accessory and a real alternative to a monitor and that’s before you’ve bought anything to actually play on it.
Nobody buying the ROG Xreal R1 is doing so because they need to. It exists for people who already know they want a pair of AR gaming glasses and are simply deciding whether this is the pair worth having. For that fairly narrow audience, the improved refresh rate and the flexibility of the dock make a reasonable case for themselves.
For everyone else, a good monitor is still going to make more sense and cost you rather less in the process. The monitor is less portable, however, so that could be the deciding factor for those always on the move.