NxtWear Air is a personal secondary display for your phone or laptop embedded in a pair of glasses frames. | Image: TCL
TCL is preparing to launch a second iteration of the wearable personal display it released in limited supply last year. Version two, called NxtWear Air, offers the same secondary-display-in-a-pair-of-glasses function as the original but has been made 30 percent lighter — down to 75g compared to 130g. TCL has made some adjustments for the style-conscious, too, tweaking the design to look more like a normal pair of sunglasses and less like something you’d be embarrassed to wear in public.
NxtWear Air, like its NxtWear G predecessor, offers two 1080p Micro OLEDs embedded in a pair of glasses frames that should give the wearer the effect of viewing a 140-inch screen from about 13 feet away. Its lenses are opaque, and the glasses don’t offer AR or VR functionality.
Image: TCL
Swappable plates attach to the front of the frames via magnets.
Instead, it acts as a secondary display that you wear on your face, using USB-C to connect to a DisplayPort-compatible phone, tablet, or laptop. Stereo speakers are built in, but if you don’t want to annoy everyone in earshot, you should connect Bluetooth or wired headphones instead. This year’s model also comes with two magnetic interchangeable plates that attach to the front of the frames to change up the style of the glasses.
TCL says NxtWear Air will launch in Q1 of 2022. There’s no word on which regions it will be available in, and TCL hasn’t revealed a price for them yet. NxtWear G went on sale in a limited run in Australia last year priced at $899 (about $680 US), so expect to spend a little money for the most private monitor you can use on a plane.