Spacetop: A Promising Concept, But Is AR Ready for Productivity?

Spacetop, the brainchild of Sightful, initially captured my attention with its bold vision: to redefine the laptop experience by ditching the traditional screen altogether. Back when the company was showcasing the Spacetop G1, the idea was to leverage augmented reality glasses and a bespoke operating system to create a sprawling, virtual workspace for applications. While the G1 was a rough prototype with a rudimentary OS, I admired the audaciousness of challenging the established norms of laptop design.

Fast forward a year, and the landscape has shifted. Sightful, a company composed of veterans from Magic Leap, now asserts that advancements in "AI PCs" have reached a point where they can seamlessly support AR software. Whether this claim holds water is debatable. Regardless, the original self-contained G1 AR laptop is no more. Spacetop has transitioned into a software-centric solution.

The current offering entails purchasing a $900 bundle, combining the Spacetop application with Xreal Air 2 Ultra glasses. This setup operates on standard Windows 11, leaving Mac users out in the cold for the time being. The software provides a year’s subscription to a virtual environment, resembling a pegboard, where users can arrange their windows and applications in AR space. The laptop screen continues to display the desktop, but the applications themselves are projected in front of your eyes through the AR glasses.

This effectively allows users to customize their virtual desktop to mirror their preferred monitor configuration. Whether you’re a coder who thrives on three vertically-oriented screens or someone who prefers an ultrawide display for multiple browsers, Spacetop theoretically offers the flexibility to accommodate your workflow. The fundamental question, however, is whether you would actually want to adopt this approach. Personally, I would opt for a conventional single monitor over straining my eyes to work with a screen positioned inches from my face.

Sightful furnished me with a preconfigured HP laptop and a pair of Xreal glasses for evaluation. The software is currently compatible with Intel Core Ultra Series 1 or 2 CPUs, and it necessitates a minimum of 16GB of RAM and a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 USB-C port. The most glaring issue becomes apparent the moment you put on the bundled Xreal Air 2 Ultra glasses. The 52-degree field of view provided by the glasses’ micro-OLED panels is so restrictive that it compels you to physically turn your head to focus on each application individually. A quick glance at my email on another browser, a routine task, becomes an exercise in neck rotation. I felt like a submarine captain peering through a periscope, desperately searching for the desired application.

In my office environment, I primarily work on a MacBook Pro connected to a 34-inch ultrawide monitor. Two screens suffice for managing my Slack feed, multiple browsers, and other essential applications. I attempted to replicate this setup using Spacetop at home, but after just two hours, the inevitable eye strain kicked in. I spend nine hours a day, Monday through Friday, working at a computer, yet I experienced significantly more fatigue in just two hours using Spacetop for the same tasks. The Xreal Air 2 Ultra glasses offer a single-click image dimming feature, but it wasn’t enough to alleviate the pressure building between my eyes.

This is a common drawback of having a display so close to your eyes. I encountered similar issues when attempting to work with mixed reality headsets like the Apple Vision Pro. Apple’s $3,500 "spatial computer" boasts a wider FOV of around 100 degrees, double that of the Xreal Air 2 Ultra. While this improves multitasking by allowing you to see more of your applications at once, eye fatigue is still unavoidable. The Vision Pro can mirror a Mac screen in an ultrawide format that spans the length of the room. The Xreal glasses are lighter and more comfortable, but I found myself needing to remove them around the same time my head would tire from supporting a Vision Pro or Meta Quest.

One advantage of Sightful’s solution is its relative inconspicuousness compared to the Vision Pro in public settings, although the constant head-turning might make you appear to be tracking an invisible insect. Spacetop also suffers from smaller, yet irritating, issues. Every time I opened a new window, like a photo, I had to search for it as it randomly appeared somewhere in the AR view. When I pressed Ctrl+Alt+Delete, a glitch caused the new window to appear on the desktop view instead of its own AR window, and the mouse cursor vanished. Hopefully, these issues will be addressed in future software updates.

Spacetop could be a solution in search of a problem. Currently, AR seems best suited for mirroring a single screen at a time. The Xreal Air 2 Ultra’s displays are of sufficient quality that I had no difficulty reading text, and they would be suitable for watching streaming content from the comfort of a couch. I can envision someone on the go, perhaps on a train or plane, benefiting from a wider canvas for their applications and browsers. Let’s consider a more niche scenario: an employee who wants to discreetly play video games on their PC while at work might find refuge in the AR environment. I wasn’t able to assess the impact of the AR environment on PC performance, but a powerful GPU would still be required to run the AR environment alongside any graphically demanding applications.

Sightful recommends laptops like the 2024 Dell XPS or an Asus Zenbook S14 with Intel Lunar Lake chips, which are well-suited for Spacetop. The Xreal glasses cost $700 individually, but the software and glasses bundle is priced at $900, which includes a $200 12-month subscription to the Spacetop software. A monthly subscription option is not currently available, though Sightful intends to introduce it in the future. The absence of a more affordable subscription option is a significant drawback. It reduces the likelihood of receiving a refund if you dislike Spacetop, and it offers less assurance that you will recoup your investment if the application’s services were to become unavailable.

I remain optimistic about the future of AR glasses. Perhaps advancements in display technology will mitigate the eye strain associated with Spacetop. The system delivers on its promises, but it leaves me yearning for a conventional multi-screen setup. It might be a viable solution for on-the-go workers, but perhaps there is a time and a place to immerse yourself in work. Maybe you should leave the grind at home and use travel time to relax. After all, screens are not going anywhere. The current iteration of Spacetop feels like a glimpse into the future, but it’s not quite ready to replace the tried-and-true methods of desktop productivity. The limited field of view, the software quirks, and the eye strain outweigh the benefits for now. It’s a noble experiment, but one that needs further refinement before it can truly revolutionize the way we work. The underlying concept of a portable, customizable workspace is appealing, but the technology needs to catch up to the vision.