These smart glasses turned my iPhone into a legitimate spatial computer

The recently announced Viture Pro smart glasses are a nice upgrade in brightness and clarity over the original model. I’ve been testing them for several weeks and was pleasantly surprised to find a unique feature that lets me use my iPhone like a spatial computer.

I’ve been looking for a good mobile desktop solution that lets me work from anywhere without sacrificing the multiscreen convenience of my home office workstation.

The Meta Quest 3 came close, and I’ve tested all the best smart glasses to find a practical solution. This time I put the Viture Pro to the test as a pocketable laptop replacement.

Viture’s new trackpad mode

Display smart glasses often have mobile apps that let you see up to three browsers windows, but lack an essential productivity feature –simple and accurate cursor control. Viture solved this problem with its new trackpad mode.

I’ve tried using Xreal’s excellent Air 2 display glasses with my phone, but it’s awkward to switch between holding the phone to move the cursor and putting it down to type on my Bluetooth keyboard.

Viture’s default setting turns my phone into a virtual laser pointer, just like Xreal’s Nebula app. That’s nice for casual browsing and watching videos. However, when I’m trying to work, the iPhone keyboard isn’t the best solution. Nothing beats a physical keyboard for fast typing and editing. A mouse or trackpad is equally indispensable, allowing precise control without lifting my phone.

Viture’s SpaceWalker app now includes a Trackpad mode that lets me tap and drag on my iPhone’s screen to control a cursor that appears on the Viture Pro’s virtual screens. After I pair a Bluetooth keyboard to my iPhone, the combination behaves like a spatial computer.

Viture Pro displays

At 1,000 nits, the Viture Pro’s displays are the brightest available. It’s easy to see when using them indoors. When outdoors or working in intense lighting, electrochromic dimming can darken ambient light by 99.9%.

To give you an idea of how easy it is to read text with Viture Pro, here’s my environment. I sit under five daylight LED bulbs that are 60-watt equivalent and there’s a window about a foot to my left. I can use the glasses without activating the dimming features, but that does come in handy if I use them outdoors.

While VR or AR use image processing to angle and warp virtual displays so they appear to hover in 3D space, display smart glasses like the Viture Pro simply present a flat virtual screen aligned with the actual OLED panels, so text is very crisp. Viture includes diopter adjustment dials to fine-tune the sharpness further, even if you have myopia.

Viture’s iPhone app

Viture’s SpaceWalker app that enables multiple virtual displays runs on an iPhone. That sets the Viture One and Pro apart from competing solutions from Xreal, RayNeo, and Rokid that only have Android apps.

I did need an adapter to use it with my iPhone 13 Pro Max, since it has a Lightning port instead of the more modern USB-C port of the iPhone 15.

I connected the adapter and glasses, opened the mobile app, and immediately saw a giant screen floating in front of me. The home screen shows a news feed in the center, preference settings in a left sidebar, and a few apps at the right.

Most apps are for media consumption, but the browser is what I was interested in. I write in Lex.page, a secure online text editor, before transferring my articles to their final location for the last touches. I like to keep Gmail or a social media website open to stay in touch with colleagues, and the third window is for the topic I’m researching.

It’s like having three bright, crisp 1080p monitors perfectly positioned with no glare or dust interfering with my view. Compared to my two vertically stacked 1440p monitors, I have plenty of screen space and clarity.

The spatial computing experience is nice, but a few little things kept me from wanting to use this setup full time. While trackpad mode supports pointing, clicking, and scrolling, I can’t right-click or drag to select a block of text. I adapted to using the arrow keys on my keyboard to select text.

Viture’s SpaceWalker app recognizes when I rotate my head, sliding another screen into view as I turn to the left or right. The tracking is good, but not as reliable as a VR headset. Sometimes I had to reset the view with a button below the trackpad. I switched head tracking off to avoid an unwanted shift in my view. In this mode, a two-finger swipe scrolls the screens or chooses a window from the bottom dock.

Trackpad mode is new, so I’m hopeful Viture continues to refine the experience. Since most of my work takes place in a browser, Viture Pro very nearly served as a laptop replacement.

Viture Pro compatibility

While Viture Pro’s iPhone app is unique among smart glasses, there’s also a SpaceWalker app for all my other devices. I can connect it to my Samsung Galaxy S20 phone, MacBook Air, and Windows PC.

The Android app is quite similar to using Spacewalker on an iPhone, and the browser is the app I used most. Some web apps have issues with the SpaceWalker browser. For example, Google Sheets gave a warning that the browser wasn’t compatible, and I couldn’t access the bottom tabs to switch spreadsheets. It would be great if I could use Chrome or Safari, but Viture needed a custom solution for the virtual displays.

The experience when I connect to my PC or Mac is quite different, unlocking various display modes, such as vertically stacked screens, a combination of horizontal and vertical screen orientations, and an ultrawide screen. I can run any browser or app I have installed.

While connecting my iPhone to Viture Pro isn’t the ultimate mobile productivity solution, it’s an ultra-compact and useful combination. For work use, I’d still connect smart glasses to a MacBook or Windows laptop so I can access any app and keep my head up while working, greatly expanding my desktop space.

The Viture Pro are among the best smart glasses available, and the development team is responsive to feedback, updating the SpaceWalker app to take care of issues and add features. If you own an iPhone and have an interest in smart glasses with displays, Viture is the brand to get.

There are three models: the Viture One Lite, One, and Pro. The Viture Pro has the best displays, but I found the standard model is also very good. You can see all the details and specifications on Viture’s website.