Can These Glasses Replace Your TV? RayNeo Air 3S Review

Can display glasses replace your monitor, TV or gaming screen? I spent two weeks using the RayNeo Air 3S for work, gaming and entertainment to find out. Every year the displays get sharper, the designs more comfortable and the features more refined, but the steps are small, so the real question is when they make sense as an everyday device. This is my RayNeo Air 3S review.

RayNeo sent us the glasses and sponsored my first-impressions video. This full review isn’t sponsored.

What these glasses are

A quick refresher: these are video glasses, not AR glasses. They don’t put digital objects into the real world. They act as a wearable display that creates a virtual screen of 201 inches, floating in front of you. They connect over USB-C and work with over 1,000 devices that support DisplayPort over USB-C, including phones, tablets, laptops and gaming consoles. My first impressions covered gaming and movies. This time I pushed them further to see if they’re practical every day.

Design and controls

Not much has changed from earlier models. They still use birdbath optics, which makes them thicker than normal sunglasses, and a front panel hides that and gives them a sleeker, lower look. The frame colour is a little lighter now, with a subtle texture on the sides. They’re not the perfect light smart glasses yet, but nobody makes those yet, and these look clean compared with what’s out there. I didn’t get weird looks wearing them outside, which tells me something.

• Left arm: volume, and a menu button for whisper mode, the refresh rate (60 or 120Hz) and the display modes (standard, game, movie and eye protection).
• Right arm: brightness controls and the USB-C port. Speakers sit in the arms.
• 3D mode: press the first buttons on both temples at once. It works instantly with full side-by-side 3D video.

Setup is plug and play: connect the included cable to your device and that’s it.

Display and brightness

RayNeo calls it a HueView screen. I’m not sure what that means beyond branding, but the specs sound solid:

• 0.6-inch micro-OLED panels
• 1920 x 1080 in 2D, 3840 x 1080 in 3D
• 49 pixels per degree (PPD), for sharp images with minimal screen door effect
• 47° field of view, which is standard for display glasses
• An eyebox of 14 by 7 mm

You can set brightness across 10 levels on the glasses, so dark rooms and daylight are both manageable. The front panel darkens the view enough to keep things visible, but in direct sunlight it isn’t quite bright enough. I could see the display reasonably well, but it wasn’t easier to read than my MacBook outside, depending on the glare. In the shade it’s bright enough. Some other glasses do more against sunlight: clip-on covers, or on XREAL’s more expensive models, electronic tint you change with a button, which makes the image clearer outdoors. Whether that matters depends on how often you’re outside and your budget, because these are the more affordable option.

Gaming over long sessions

Gaming is my favourite thing to do with the Air 3S, and they held up really well for long sessions. Colours look rich and balanced without being oversaturated, contrast and blacks are great thanks to OLED, and the image has good depth. I always check input lag: at 120Hz everything looked very smooth and I didn’t notice any delay. The default is 60Hz, and I much prefer 120.

I played a lot on my ROG Ally X, and on the Switch I used RayNeo’s JoyDock. It’s RayNeo’s official Switch accessory, because Nintendo made it far too difficult to connect the Switch to an external display. It attaches to the Switch and extends battery life:

• Battery: 10,000mAh (2 x 5,000mAh)
• Weight: 282 g
• Claimed extra play time: up to 5 hours, which matched my testing. I played well past the Switch’s normal battery life.

Comfort

After longer sessions, the Air 3S feels as comfortable as other display glasses I’ve tested. At 78 grams they’re light enough that I didn’t feel real strain. The cable gets in the way a bit, but there are no affordable fully wireless display glasses yet, so we’ll have to be patient.

No display glasses are perfect for marathons. After a few hours I felt some pressure on the bridge of my nose and might get little marks, which is common, but it didn’t make me want to stop. RayNeo’s eye protection tech reduces flicker and blue light, and I didn’t notice real eye fatigue, even after hours of gaming and movies.

Movies: I took them to the cinema

RayNeo markets these as a personal cinema, so I tested that claim. I live next to a cinema, so I brought the Air 3S to the movies and compared scenes on the theatre screen and through the glasses. Yes, I was the crazy person in a theatre wearing smart glasses.

It’s closer than you’d think. A real screen is obviously much bigger, but because the glasses sit right in front of your eyes, the illusion of size works surprisingly well. The 49 PPD on such small displays keeps everything sharp and detailed, with crisp text and clean visuals. It’s not as big as an IMAX screen and you don’t get the scale and presence of a real theatre, but for something this compact it delivers. I also set up a projector on my wall at the perceived size to show how big it feels, and it’s not bad at all.

Display modes

There are four modes, which not all display glasses offer. The differences aren’t huge, but I switched more often than I expected:

• Movie: warmer, great for films and natural skin tones.
• Standard: cooler and a bit brighter.
• Game: somewhere in between. It didn’t add much to my gaming.
• Eye protection: lower brightness and a soft yellow tint, nice at night.

It’s subtle, but nice to have.

Audio and whisper mode

The speakers in the arms send sound straight to your ears while limiting what others hear. Even at louder volumes, people nearby won’t catch much, which is great for privacy. They’re the same speakers as on the Air 2S, which already sounded great.

Whisper mode reduces leakage further. I tested it in a quiet room lying next to my partner: some audio still leaks at higher volumes, but it’s subtle enough not to disturb anyone. I prefer normal mode because it sounds fuller, but whisper mode is useful in quiet places.

One catch: with dialogue-heavy scenes in noisier spaces, the maximum volume wasn’t always enough. I haven’t tested them on a plane yet, but planes are much louder, so I think they might struggle there. You can always plug in your own headphones.

Pocket TV for long trips

If you want to watch a lot without draining your phone, RayNeo’s Pocket TV is a tiny streaming box with Google TV that connects straight to the glasses. It has a 6,500mAh battery for about five and a half hours, 64 GB of storage for offline videos (plus USB or TF card), all the usual streaming apps and Google Assistant voice control. I reviewed it with the previous RayNeo glasses. If you travel a lot and want a working phone at the end of the trip, it’s a nice add-on.

Can it replace a monitor for work?

That depends on what you need. 1920 x 1080 is fine for browsing, writing and watching videos, but if you’re used to a higher resolution monitor, you’ll notice. A bigger perceived screen doesn’t give you more workspace, it just makes everything bigger, so detailed spreadsheets, coding or video editing can feel cramped next to a 4K or ultrawide display.

Where they make sense is travel. Outside you don’t fight glare like on a laptop screen, and leaning back on the couch to get some work done is really comfortable. The Air 3S mirrors one big screen and doesn’t support multiple virtual screens (RayNeo has more expensive models for that), so at home, with multiple monitors, I don’t reach for them much. The screen is also locked to your face, so you can’t glance between windows like on a normal setup.

Text clarity impressed me, with one caveat. The image stays sharp across the whole display, which isn’t always the case, and the eyebox gives you a fairly generous sweet spot. Fit still matters: on my nose they sit a bit low, so I sometimes had to push them up to see the full screen. Try them on first if you can.

There’s no software to reposition or stabilize the screen, as some pricier glasses have. The image follows every small head movement, so tiny text in dense spreadsheets jitters slightly and gets harder to read. Zoomed in, like an ebook or the notes app, it’s totally doable.

For work, then: useful when travelling, solid for casual use, but not a replacement for a full monitor setup. Not yet.

If you wear glasses

RayNeo has a snap-on lens adapter for near-sighted users, with custom lenses made for you. Some brands, like Rokid, build adjustable diopters into the glasses, which is more convenient, but this is better than nothing.

RayNeo Air 3S review verdict: who they’re for

• Console gamers get a lot out of them. The high refresh rate and display quality make them great for handhelds when you don’t want to stare at a tiny screen.
• Movie lovers will like the big-screen feel and the solid built-in audio. It won’t replace a cinema, but lying back with something this compact is impressive.
• Travellers benefit most. On a plane, a train or the couch, you get a big private screen without dragging a monitor around. It’s become one of my must-pack items.

They’re not for you if you want full AR with hand tracking, spatial apps or multiple floating screens; you’ll need more advanced, more expensive glasses for that. They do play 3D and spatial videos, like those from an Apple Vision Pro, really well, but that’s not the same as a spatial device. And if you rely on 4K monitors or multi-screen work, 1080p will feel limiting.

For the price, I think RayNeo nailed the essentials: sharp visuals, decent comfort and reliable performance. If you want a clean, portable way to watch content or game on a bigger screen, they’re one of the best affordable options right now. Just remember that fit matters a lot, and a pair that doesn’t sit right can look blurry, so buy somewhere with a good return policy.