Review: Sightful Spacetop for Windows

I've been eagerly awaiting the advent of spatial computing. My home office desk setup, with multiple screens and browser windows, helps me be very productive. But on the go, I'm relegated to a laptop's 13-inch screen (or packing a portable monitor), and I'm not as efficient.

Spatial computing—usually driven by a mixed reality headset or smart glasses—lets you craft a multi-monitor virtual workspace, where you can place apps and browser windows around your periphery to replicate the experience you have set up at home or the office. Or you can take it a step further, because you're only limited by your imagination. Over the years, I've tested various versions of the technology, from the Nimo Planet smart glasses I used at CES to Apple's Vision Pro on a flight to Barcelona, as companies compete to sit at the forefront of the next era in computing. No one has been able to offer a reasonable experience—until now.

I first saw Sightful's Spacetop spatial computing software in a hotel suite at CES 2023, before the company came out of stealth mode. The initial experience worked with a pair of smart glasses connected to the bottom half of a laptop, just the keyboard and trackpad with no display, which also housed the computer's guts. In 2024, the company debuted the G1, a polished version ready for market, but Sightful CEO Tamir Berliner says the sudden advent of “AI PCs," which now offered enough power to drive a spatial computing experience, forced it to revisit its hardware.

That leads us to today's Spacetop for Windows. Instead of a custom laptop hardware sans display and software powered by Chromium, Sightful's new approach is to provide the smart glasses and let you download its Spacetop software onto a compatible Windows laptop. It costs $899 for the glasses and the software, and after the first year, you'll be charged $200 annually for access to the Spacetop software. Despite working at a few coffee shops this past week, I've been just as efficient virtually as in my work-from-home setup. I already don't want to be without it.

Work Space

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Spacetop for Windows is a piece of downloadable software, and it's designed to work with Xreal's Air 2 Ultra augmented reality glasses, which are included in your purchase. You can get prescription lens inserts for the glasses, as I did, meaning I could remove my eyeglasses to use the Xreal. If you have smart glasses from another company with similar features (namely, six degrees of freedom), you can reach out to Sightful to see if there's a solution to get Spacetop running on them. The company hopes to support a wider range of smart glasses over time.

The caveat is that Spacetop has specific laptop requirements. It only supports Intel CPUs, Core Ultra 7 or 9 Series 1 or Series 2 chipsets (155H or above), and needs at least 16 gigabytes of RAM. Sightful has a few recommended laptops on its website, like the Dell XPS, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i, the Asus Zenbook S 14, and the Acer Swift Go 14. The company says that as adoption grows, it may add support for other CPUs, like those from Qualcomm, and it hopes to have a working version for MacBooks in 2026.

I tested Spacetop on an HP OmniBook Ultra Flip with the Core Ultra 7 Series 2 chip. To get going, plug the Xreal glasses into the laptop via the USB-C cable, then launch the Spacetop app. Your open apps and browser windows will show up in a virtual space, and you can move them around and resize the windows however you see fit. (You use the laptop's keyboard and trackpad to interface with Spacetop.) If you unplug the glasses and then plug them back in some time later, Spacetop still remembers your preferred layout, unless you close specific apps.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

There's a simple dock at the bottom where you can see open apps as well as the Windows button to search through the operating system for apps or files. Tap the “i” icon to reveal shortcut keys to move the virtual space via keyboard commands. For example, pressing the left and right shift keys will center the canvas in the direction you're looking. You can push the virtual screens away from your eyes or closer, move them up or down, and even tilt them if you want to recline in a chair. Plus, I like that you can click on an empty space and drag the virtual screen to a specific app instead of turning your neck.

Most apps should work fine, but intensive apps like video and photo editing services may struggle. I primarily used multiple Chrome browser windows and tabs, had the Telegram messaging client on top, and Slack over to the left. I even launched Zoom and had it on the right during video calls. I gave Adobe Lightroom Classic a shot, but the app began behaving strangely in Spacetop, so I didn't use it. Sightful says as much on its website: “We are still working to make advanced applications like video editors or 3D graphics software run smoothly.” Gaming also falls into that camp.

No one can view your work, which is nice for handling sensitive information, and the only way around that on a traditional laptop is to use a privacy screen. At the moment, the laptop screen stays on when you're in Spacetop, but people will only be able to see a blank desktop. Sightful says it's planning an update that will turn it off to conserve battery life.

Speaking of which, I haven't used the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip as a normal laptop, so I can't confirm its regular battery stats, but HP claims “all-day battery life,” and various reviews of this laptop around the web seem to confirm this. With the AR glasses plugged in and Spacetop running, though, you're more likely to get roughly three to four hours of use, depending on what you're doing. Within an hour and a half of use, the laptop's battery life was cut in half.

I don't see this being a huge issue because most of the time you'd be using Spacetop will likely be in those short periods at a coffee shop or airport lounge, or heck, even on a plane. (There's a travel mode that lets you use Spacetop on fast-moving transportation.) And usually, if that's the case, there's probably a spot you can plug in your PC.

On the Go

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

So much of what makes Spacetop a joy to use is the glasses. The text is fairly sharp through the dual OLED display panels, though I wish the glasses had a wider field of view than 50 degrees. More importantly, this isn't a bulky Apple Vision Pro—I wore Xreal's glasses for more than three hours in one sitting, and I can't imagine doing that with Apple's VR headset. Mind you, my eyes did feel a little tired after that time, but I love that taking it off isn't a chore; it's just like removing a normal pair of glasses. I also don't feel closed off to the rest of the world—the speakers built into the arms of the glasses make it so you don't need to wear earbuds—and the whole system is far easier to travel with, complete with a glasses case.

The rocker button on the glasses frame lets you adjust the screen brightness, but there's another button that cycles through three dimming modes for the lenses: normal, dim, and dark. In the first mode, you can see the world ahead of you as the virtual screens are layered on top. This is especially handy if you're sitting in front of someone and working, but are occasionally chit-chatting. They can see your eyes, too. Outside, you'll want to dim the screen, providing a nice black backdrop for the virtual environment, and the Xreal glasses will look like sunglasses.

You won't look like a douchebag with these on, unlike if you wore Apple's Vision Pro in public, but it only takes a little more than a passing glance for someone to realize Xreal's Air 2 Ultra aren't sunglasses. Or so I thought. I sat outside a busy coffee shop, and no one gave me weird looks, and I also felt far more comfortable wearing them in public. Funnily enough, I got more confused stares when I wore it to a Zoom meeting.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

“You look like Dr. Strangelove," a coworker commented on the Zoom chat. Someone else mentioned Ray Charles. Then a colleague joked that it was hard for him to take me seriously while I was wearing the glasses. The meeting notes capped it off: “The meeting was fine, but Julian may or may not look like an idiot.”

I think one reason for the vitriol is that to all of my virtual companions, I'm looking upward. This is one of the other secret benefits of Spacetop. I don't need to crane my neck and stare at a fixed laptop screen. However, because the webcam is down there on the laptop, my colleagues are getting an unflattering angle of my face, one that highlights the awkward design of the Xreal glasses even more than if they were looking at it straight on. The easiest solution is to just turn your video off (if you really care).

I haven't run into many bugs or issues with Spacetop—it feels remarkably slick. But here are a few: Sometimes, when I boot it up for the first time, I need to unplug the glasses and plug them back in for Spacetop to load, but Sightful says this is an HP-specific bug it's addressing soon. On another occasion, a few Chrome tabs struggled to load, but I haven't encountered that problem since. Sightful says Spacetop can accommodate any number of tabs and apps, but it all depends on the power of the processor in your laptop. The more powerful your laptop, the better your Spacetop experience.

You also can't ungroup or group browser tabs easily by dragging them; instead, I right-click the tab and tap “Move tab to another window.” It's not as user-friendly but at least there's a solution; Sightful says it's working on a fix. One annoying thing I dealt with was more of a Windows problem, where the trackpad would think my two-finger swipe up was a three-finger swipe up and would try to show the desktop. This looked jarring in Spacetop and disrupted my flow. Thankfully, I was able to turn it off in the Windows settings.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Spacetop isn't for most people. It's for power users who have too many browser tabs open to count and have multi-monitor setups they miss when traveling. It's for the person who wants to do some work on the flight and pays for the in-flight Wi-Fi (that inevitably doesn't work). There are things that are still not supported, like screen sharing in apps like Zoom, but Sightful says it's on the road map, with more to come.

The software hinges on the smart-glasses experience, which I imagine will continue to get smaller, thinner, lighter—maybe even wireless—until you can't tell them apart from regular eyeglasses. But for now, Sightful has crafted a practical and genuinely useful spatial computing experience that I haven't experienced before. There's almost no learning curve since it still very much feels like you're using a laptop, just with an expansive virtual screen that's yours to fill.