I Tried a 201″ Virtual Cinema—Here’s Why It Blew Me Away and What Drove Me Nuts

Featuring two HD OLED displays that produce a vibrant and stunning virtual 201-inch screen (at a distance of six meters), the RayNeo Air 2S is a fantastic option in the wearable personal cinema space. I found them impractical as daily-wear XR glasses, but your experience may vary.

RayNeo Air 2S

While the comfort and fit fall short as an all-day wearable, it’s an enormous virtual display and the visuals are stunning. For on-the-go gaming or pairing with the optional Pocket TV media player, it’s the best virtual cinema screen yet.

Pros & Cons

• Stunning display, with dual HD OLED screens providing deep blacks, vibrant colors, and an immersive field of view.
• Lightweight design and hard carry case make it easy to transport.
• Adjustable viewing angle for optimum screen comfort.
• Great range of brightness, up to 5000 nits for daytime use.

• Poor fit and comfort thanks to a fixed frame with slippery plastic that constantly feels like it’ll fall off.
• Limited privacy since the screen can be seen through the shades.
• No HUD functionality to adjust display position or minimize.

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Price and Availability

Depending on the bundle you opt for, you can find the RayNeo Air 2S starting at $280 for just the glasses, up to $450, including the Pocket TV media player. It’s worth getting the bundle if you can, as the Pocket TV is an all-in-one Google TV player with built-in controls.

The Carry Case Is Superb

Inside the box is a handy carry case with plenty of padding as well as extra room for the cable and the optional media player. The USB-C cable supplied–which is typically the only thing you’ll need to plug in–features a slightly angled plug to help the cable drop down naturally and avoid stress. It falls from the right-hand side and is just long enough to reach into the pocket of your pants.

A spare nose pad and example prescription lenses are included to test the comfort, though you’ll need to pay around $100 for an actual prescription insert if needed.

To be clear, you can use these on top of your existing glasses, but it’s not ideal. For testing, I was provided with and exclusively used a prescription insert to correct my nearsightedness and allow me to use these all day.

Fit and Comfort: Don’t Move Too Much

Unlike a large VR headset with extensive customization to make it fit your head shape and eye distance, the RayNeo is a fixed-frame pair of glasses with almost no fit customization. The one thing it does offer—which I haven’t seen before—is a way to angle the display slightly up or down. It’s not the same as a flip-up system to temporarily remove the display from your vision, but it does ensure ideal placement of the virtual display within your field of view.

However, in terms of fit, no amount of fiddling made it feel secure for me. It always felt a little too large, with the ear cuffs extending too far back, so there was a constant feeling of them slipping off. The smooth, slippery ABS plastic doesn’t help; if you look at actual glasses, they use a non-slip resin around the ears. The weight isn’t a problem at 78g (2.75oz).

The rubber nose piece is comfortable and felt like the only thing keeping them on my face, but if I pushed it down any more to help with the slipping, the top edge pushed on the bridge of my nose. Other manufacturers have tried to solve this by offering a “comfort strap”—a rubber or elastic strap to go around the back of your head—but I think a more non-slip or adjustable frame around the ears would have been sufficient.

Visuals: Superb With a Large Field of View…Almost Too Large

With dual OLED screens, these are the deepest blacks you’ll find on a head-mounted display, and they’re absolutely stunning in that regard. Since the lenses remain transparent at all times and there’s no blackout cover, you’ll only be able to appreciate this in a dark room.

The brightness is astounding, and you’ll find that even in daylight use, white at the highest brightness overwhelms and completely blocks out any vision of the real world—with one, small caveat. The diagonally mounted prism of the screens means you can see your chest reflected back to you. There’s also a great range of brightness adjustments accessible from a hardware toggle on the right arm; however, I found the lowest two settings suddenly introduce a green tint to the greys.

Despite not being HDR, the color range is superb and vibrant enough for any media watching or gaming—you won’t be disappointed. I couldn’t find any color aberrations, smearing, pixelation, or other quirks that sometimes accompany personal cinema displays. That’s the power of OLED.

The RayNeo Air 2S features better edge-to-edge clarity than the original Air 2 (which I briefly tested due to a shipping mix up), but it’s still not perfect—and without a way to adjust the IPD, I don’t see how it could be. As a private display for media, a slightly blurry edge isn’t a huge concern. But as a monitor replacement for productivity, it’s not ideal.

Part of the issue stems from the sheer screen size that’s being virtually projected. You have to be really careful with placement to get the whole thing in view without it being cropped. This was exacerbated by its propensity to not sit still on my face, so any kind of vigorous movement meant having to re-adjust.

That said, I find claims like “201-inch screen” entirely misleading because it’s only like that if you imagine sitting five meters (16 feet) away. That’s much further than I’d generally sit from my 201-inch projected home cinema screen and about a 1:1 throw ratio if we were reviewing a projector. I could be equally absurd and say it’s like a 2-mile widescreen—if you were standing 2 miles away.

Instead, let’s consider more day-to-day scenarios of familiarity. I use a 40” screen on my desktop, and to match that to what I can see virtually in the Air 2S, I had to stand about one meter away. That’s twice as far as I would normally stand. It’s the equivalent of a 27″ monitor at a normal seated distance.

Having a 27″ monitor inside of your glasses is still impressive, and the 1080p full HD resolution is more than sufficient for media watching or daily desktop use.

I’ll also note that the display isn’t technically private. Although it’s only about half an inch diagonal, it’s perfectly visible to anyone looking closely at your eyes. But they’d have to be quite close.

Available in a bundle, the Pocket TV from sister brand Homatics is, without being hyperbolic, the best portable media player I’ve come across yet. It’s also available separately for around $150, and if you already have a portable cinema display you’re happy with, I have no hesitation in recommending you go buy a Pocket TV right now to pair with it.

Unlike the multitude of other Google TV media players (and I’ll emphasize that this is Google TV, not Android TV), which pair with a generic remote control, the Pocket TV has control buttons built into the device itself. This is brilliant, as I’ll never lose it, and it’s only slightly less strange to stick your hand in your pocket and fiddle around a bit than it is to whip out a remote control while walking down the road.

The Pocket TV features a big, smooth directional pad, the standard assortment of YouTube, Amazon Prime, Voice search, Volume, Back, and Home buttons, and (I love this) a rocket ship button.

Like me, you might be a little confused about what the rocket ship does. I must admit I was hoping for a secret built-in streaming app that gave me free TV from anywhere in the world. Even better, it turned out to be a customizable app launcher, so you choose precisely what app it opens. I opted for Plex.

The Pocket TV plugs into the RayNeo Air 2 with a single USB-C to C cable. It includes a 6500mAh battery, which is more than enough for hours of media watching. But you also charge it simultaneously if needed in the other USB-C port (don’t get them confused though, the video output port has a headset symbol on it).

Other feature you’ll appreciate on long flights or anywhere without Wi-Fi is the microSD slot on the side. Load up with media, and you’re all set for offline use—though I’d recommend installing VLC before you head out. And if you do find the screen is too large, the Pocket TV lets you scale it down from 100% to 80%.

Gaming on the RayNeo 2S

Although capable of handing up to 120Hz input, the Pocket TV box runs at 60Hz. It’s only once you get into gaming and other inputs that the 120Hz is possible. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to hook up the Air 2S to my Playstation 5 to test this; there’s no HDMI input adapter supplied, and the one I have lying around for other AR glasses was seemingly not compatible. Direct USB-C output isn’t possible from the PlayStation 5 (even though that’s how the PSVR2 connects).

I tried using the SteamDeck instead, which uses a single USB-C cable for connectivity. The SteamDeck’s built-in display is disabled, so this is an excellent way of conserving battery life while enjoying a massive, incredible virtual display. It’s not 120Hz, but it still looks fantastic—much better than staring down at a 7-inch screen.

What It’s Like to Use to RayNeo Air 2S in Daily Life?

The permanent darkened shades weren’t as frustrating as I thought they would be in daily life; it turns out I’m probably allergic to sunlight. But with the display turned off, the screen area introduces a rainbow-like shimmering effect on white light, which made staring at my actual desktop monitor quite disconcerting. If you need to continue using physical displays, you’ll find wearing these all day impractical.

I had hoped to use the RayNeo Air 2S like a Heads-Up Display—something off to the side of my vision at all times. The XREAL Air 2 with the Beam box could reposition and resize the input signal in that way, but the box required to do this was otherwise devoid of function, so that’s not a recommendation.

Although the Pocket TV allows you to reduce the screen size to 80%, that’s anchored to the center and still massive, so it’s not enough to let you push it into your peripheral vision. I’m surprised there aren’t more Heads-Up Display apps available on Android with configurable modules like email notifications or breaking news. We have the hardware to do this…but no software.

The angle adjustment allows you to have the enormous screen of the RayNeo Air 2S either completely take up the center of your vision, bring the screen lower for more relaxed viewing, or push it upwards and maintain some degree of regular vision in the lower third; but it’s not a drastic change in any case.

The RayNeo 2S are being marketed in some channels as an alternative to VR/AR headsets, but that’s an unfair comparison. They are not a viable alternative, and the only connection to the real world is that the lenses are semi-translucent. There’s no camera to map your surroundings and integrate with the real-world features, nor a gyrometer sensor or positional data to adjust the display. The RayNeo Air 2S are best described as a personal cinema display with a semi-transparent background.

I found that I could write, play with my phone, or do anything in the bottom half of my vision just fine. Like, eat lunch. But I never found it practical to walk around—or do any other involved task—while watching content. So, as AR glasses to keep on all day, these wouldn’t work.

The use of prescription lenses that are smaller than my standard glasses also added complications because it meant my vision was segregated into distinct sections. There’s blurry peripheral vision, clear standard vision with the prescription, darkened areas of the shades, and the central screen area (with the shimmering mentioned earlier when the display was off). On top of that, despite the prescription being identical to my daily lenses, they seemed to introduce some warping when I turned my head. This may be unique to my vision, of course, but you’re definitely going to have a better experience if you don’t need glasses.

I haven’t mentioned the audio in this review yet because I didn’t feel it was anything to shout about. The RayNeo Air 2S features, apparently, an industry-first “push-push quad-speaker system”, which helps to reduce resonance. In any case, the audio is clear but understandably tinny—it’s sufficient for watching media, but know that anyone sitting next to you will potentially hear it, too. You can enable a “whisper mode” on the glasses to reduce audio leak, and I found I preferred the audio in this mode anyway. Bluetooth is an option if you need better quality, or greater privacy.

Should You Buy the RayNeo Air 2S?

While the fit could be better (and will depend on your face shape anyway), the screen quality, field of view, and brightness that the RayNeo Air 2S achieves are outstanding, considering the low price. The only point I’d make here is that there are no blackout shades, so the ambient light levels will always affect the darker areas of the image, and everyone can see what you’re watching if they look closely enough.

I appreciate the hard carry case, and I can’t fault the true all-in-one Pocket TV media player with built-in controls. It played everything I threw at it, allows for offline use with the SD card slot, and runs a modern Google TV OS.

I’m not accustomed to wearing comically oversized sunglasses, so the RayNeo Air 2S isn’t discreet enough that I’d be happy to wear them out and about in the street, nor does the software exist to turn them into a proper Heads-Up Display. Combined with the general impracticality of walking around while wearing them, they’ll be a strictly static experience for me. But they’re handy for some on-the-go big-screen gaming or media watching, and they are the most impressive portable cinema display I’ve tried yet.

RayNeo Air 2S

While the comfort and fit fall short as an all-day wearable, it’s an enormous virtual display and the visuals are stunning. For on-the-go gaming or pairing with the optional Pocket TV media player, it’s the best virtual cinema screen yet.