Rather than offering a full augmented reality experience that scans your surroundings and offers contextual information, the Rokid Max glasses ($439) simply project an image in front of your eyes like a face-mounted monitor, with a few motion-based features you can enable through an Android-only companion mobile app. They're a bit more expensive than the competing TCL NXTWear S ($399), but they boast a wider field of view by seven degrees. They also offer diopter adjustment dials so you don’t have to order separate prescription lens inserts if you’re nearsighted, a feature we’ve only seen on the pricier Viture One ($549) glasses so far. While they don’t look as much like normal sunglasses as those competitors, the Rokid Max glasses stand out for their larger picture.

Design: Functional, Not Subtle

Rokid advertises the Max as smart glasses, but they're more like a head-worn monitor that can project a bright, colorful picture over a nearly transparent view of everything around you. They're not overly bulky and don’t scream “AR display,” but their large, almost buglike oval front lenses definitely make them look less like normal sunglasses than the TCL NXTWear S. The lenses are tinted, but not as much as the NXTWear S sunshades, so Rokid includes an opaque black plastic snap-on cover for the glasses. It effectively blocks bright light that would make the picture difficult to see, but it also makes the glasses look even less subtle in use.

A volume rocker and a brightness-cycling button sit on the underside of the right temple. The left temple, meanwhile, has a USB-C port on the end for connecting to a compatible device with the included USB-C-to-USB-C cable. It’s more secure than the magnetic connector on the NXTWear S and is less prone to getting easily disconnected, but the tradeoff is that the cable is more likely to tug on your head or yank your connected device if you inattentively pull away from it.

The best physical aspect of the Rokid Max is above the inward-facing lenses. Two small diopter wheels let you adjust the distance of the lenses from your eyes to focus them. This means you can probably get the glasses to look sharp even if you’re nearsighted, without having to order prescription lens inserts like you do with the NXTWear S.

Picture: Field of View Makes a Difference

It seems that almost every major pair of AR/video glasses currently on the market uses micro-OLED displays to project a 1080p picture to each eye. This makes them similarly bright and vivid, but they differ in terms of field of view and refresh rate. The Rokid Max glasses have a 50-degree diagonal field of view, one of the widest we've seen in the category. For contrast, the NXTWear S glasses have a 45-degree field of view, and the Viture One shows an even narrower 43 degrees.

Field of view relates to the amount of visual space the active picture takes up, and that can make a huge difference in not only how big it looks to your eyes, but also how flexible the glasses are in terms of fit and wear. The NXTWear S glasses, for example, need to be positioned in a somewhat frustratingly small sweet spot to see all of the picture. The Rokid Max glasses, on the other hand, are pleasantly easy to align and show one of the widest images I’ve seen.

Remember, AR is not VR, and while VR headsets take up almost all of your sight, they do so using lenses that refract the projected image and don’t leave any peripheral space to look at your surroundings. Newer headsets like the Meta Quest 3 have color passthrough cameras that offer that kind of view, but they aren’t nearly as sharp as simply looking at everything around you, undistorted.

Connectivity: USB-C DP or Grab an Adapter

Like most AR glasses, the Rokid Max use DisplayPort over USB-C for both power and video. For most modern notebooks, you should be able to simply plug the cable into a USB-C port. For Android phones, your experience will be hit-or-miss; Motorola smartphones often support video over USB-C, but Google and Samsung smartphones don’t. Rokid doesn’t offer a USB-C video adapter for use with Galaxy or Pixel handsets (or a Lightning connector for older iPhones), but third-party adapters are available. For game consoles and PCs without USB-C DisplayPort, Rokid sells an HDMI-to-USB-C converter for $39.

If your phone supports USB-C DisplayPort, you can run the Android-only Rokid AR app for a more immersive AR experience. It takes advantage of the glasses’ motion sensors to provide a virtual floating interface in front of you that remains oriented relative to where you’re sitting as you move your head rather than appearing as a flat fixed image. It also turns your phone into an air mouse, letting you point at menu options on the virtual screen with a wave.

Like all AR apps for video glasses that we’ve seen so far, it’s a very limited tool that lets you watch videos, look at images, and browse the web. It also offers a selection of downloadable AR additional apps, but it’s slim pickings. The Rokid Max can’t track its surroundings, and if it can’t determine what’s in your reality, it can’t truly augment it.

The optional Rokid Station ($99 when bundled with the Rokid Max, or available separately for $199) is a standalone Android TV-based device that outputs directly to the glasses through its USB-C port. It's about the size of a cell phone, with buttons like a media streamer remote control, and it offers five hours of battery life on a charge. It’s capable if you mostly want to stream media or do very light work by pairing it with a keyboard, but Android TV is already an aging operating system compared with the more streamlined Google TV, and it isn’t nearly as powerful as straight Android.

Experience: Wear Almost Anywhere

The TCL NXTWear S started showing me how useful AR glasses can be for work and play, but the Rokid Max are actually selling me on the concept. Their wider field of view and diopter adjustments make a big difference to the experience since I don't have to wrestle with finding a sweet spot or get additional lens inserts. I'm writing this review sitting in a coffee shop wearing the glasses (and not drawing too much attention). The picture is bright, text is sharp, and the glasses are comfortable.

While the glasses can get a little warm after long periods of use, they don't seem to get as hot as the NXTWear S. I have little problem using them for relatively long periods (with breaks to give my eyes a rest, as I recommend for any head-mounted display).

Good Glasses for Niche Use Cases

The Rokid Max glasses can serve as an external display for your laptop, offering a bright, colorful picture plus visual privacy. Their bulbous look makes them less stealthy than competitors like the NXTWear S and the Viture One, but they put a larger picture before your eyes thanks to a wider 50-degree diagonal field of view. We also appreciate their diopter adjustment dials, which allow for clear visuals without separate prescription lens inserts if you’re nearsighted. While the use case for this type of glasses is admittedly niche, the Rokid Max help solidify the category as one worth watching.