u/Yablan

I bought the Xreal S1 two days ago, and today I took them outside for the first time. And honestly, it worked better than I expected.

I sat on a park bench in the shade with my dog for about 45 minutes, wearing a hat to cut down on reflections a bit. There are definitely still reflections, and the resolution is not amazing, but for my use case it was perfectly workable.

I could see myself getting used to this.

The hat helped in two ways: it added some extra shade, and it made the glasses feel a bit more discreet. With the hat on, they did not look quite as huge. I even asked a woman walking by if the glasses looked too outlandish, and she said they did not.

So, first outdoor test: not perfect, but surprisingly usable.

So, I bough the S1 yesterday. I might return it, I don't know yet. But I will give it a try of course.

I bought it mostly for productivity. I will working from my girlfriends house quite a lot, and my Mac 14 inches gives me neck strain, and I have no monitor there. So I thought the S1 would work well as a portable screen to use a couple of hours at the time.

I already have a Quest 3, and working on it with Virtual Desktop is amazing. But I find the whole headset to be quite heavy, and it is quite unwieldy. And I might want to work outside too from time to time, on a park bench or something, so my dog can sit with me but still be outside for a while. Hence I am trying out the S1. I would feel like a total dork with the Quest 3 strapped on my head outside in a park. The S1 is not discreet by any means, but it looks a bit less outlandish.

Anyhow, my first impressions is that, coming from the Quest 3, which has 100 degree FOV, the screen clipping on the S1 is a bit distracting. I mean, it really does not matter, because if I am looking to the left, it IS because I want to read something on the left, so it does not matter if the screen clips a bit on the right side, but it IS a bit annoying anyway.

And for watching content or playing games, there the clipping IS annoying. Because one does usually want to watch the whole thing, and I do move my head a little almost all the time.

So what I have done, is that for productivity, for now, I have chosen 1600x1000 resolution on my Macbook, and I have set the Xreal S1 to the 175 inch screen size and 5 meters screen distance. This gives me a quite enough big resolution to work with, even within my IDE with coding, quite comfortably, which I did not expect, and gives me a bit of a buffer on each side of the screen, so it does not start to clip immediately as soon as I move my head sideways.

And the same goes for content watched at that resolution. It clips a little if I move my head sideways, but at least I have a little bit of buffer before it does.

The text is a little bit blurry, but not too bad, and at 1600x1000 it is big enough. The reflections WILL become a problem in bright environments, but I intend to buy or ask a friend 3d print me some anti reflection shields. I haven't used the Xreal outside in really bright environments yet though (it is raining outside), but I will give it a try as soon as I get a chance.

So my initial impressions basically are that I am still getting used to it, but it is growing on me. But I am still a little bit on the fence. I think I will have to try it out in bright conditions and with a light shield too.

Since we are doing portable setups and all (Flip 2)

First day working outside with my Xreal 1S, it worked just fine

Xreal S1 - initial impressions, on Macbook for productivity, went with 1600x1000 resolution