One of the most incredible experiences I had at AWE was trying out Canon’s mixed-reality headsets. One was incredibly small, and the other one incredibly expensive ($20K!!!). Let me tell you everything about these very special hands-on sessions I had.
[Notice: I tried these devices for just a few minutes each. This is a “first impressions” article and not a full review]
Canon small MR headset
Canon has recently been showcasing a very small mixed reality device. It just features the optical module and nothing more. It has no computation units, and in fact it should be connected to a PC (or a smartphone, in the future); and it has no strap, and that’s why you have to keep it with your hand close to your face. It is basically just an optical module with a handle.
You may think that this is not the ideal form factor to play Half-Life: Alyx, and actually, it is not meant to do that. Canon is not interested in the consumer VR sector, but only in the enterprise side of it. This device is meant to be installed, for instance in museums: people go next to an installation, pick up this small headset, put it close to their face, see some mixed reality artifact in front of them, and then put the headset down for the next user. As you can see, for this kind of use case, it is perfect: there is no need to lose time wearing the device, no need to provide any instructions. Everyone should just pick it up and put it close to the face. Easy and efficient.
And I think the form factor totally nails it: it is very small, lightweight, and the handle is pretty comfortable to use, too. It is an original concept, well developed.
The problems happened when I put the device close to my face and looked inside it. My first reaction was something like this:
The resolution is full HD, and the field of view is 50-something degrees. I could understand these specs in standalone AR glasses, but having them in a PC-tethered mixed reality headset seems very reductive to me. I understand that the device must be very small, but I wonder if they really couldn’t make something more than 50+ degrees.
The image quality was ok, but not incredible. Still, my experience was mostly limited by the small field of view: I think the usability threshold is 70 degrees and this is much below that.
The device has no positional tracking at the moment, so the demo could only work using markers (welcome back, 2014). I could take in my hand an object covered in markers and see a Canon 3D camera on top of it. The camera object was pretty nice to see, but again, having only marker-based visualization seems pretty limiting.
All in all, it seems to me that this device still needs to be improved by Canon. The company told me it is still a prototype the company is working on, so I’m not expressing any final judgment on it. They also told me they are planning to use the same optical module for other AR/VR headsets.
For sure, my suggestion is to make the field of view larger and to add some sort of tracking to put it more in line with what is available on the market in 2026. I understand that something has to be sacrificed to offer a small form factor, but some thresholds shouldn’t be crossed. In any case, I appreciated the originality of the form factor and its potential for some enterprise use cases, in particular public exhibitions.
Canon MREAL X1 hands-on
Besides the very small headset, Canon was also showcasing its enterprise mixed-reality headset, the MREAL X1. MREAL X1 is the successor of the MREAL S1, an MR device costing something like $38,500 for just the headset. Yes, you’ve read the number well. And asking at the booth, I’ve discovered this X1 model is cheaper, and it costs “only” around $20,000 for the headset, the PC, and the connection box. So it’s still a lot of money. I was very happy to try it, because for $20K I was expecting the true metaverse experience, a mixed reality so real that I couldn’t go back to using the “peasant” headsets anymore.
Well, let’s say it didn’t go exactly as I expected.
Let’s start from the design. The shape of the headset reminded me a bit of the Lynx: it’s a flat mixed reality device that has a generous open periphery, so that you are fully aware of the world around you. You can also choose to close some lateral blinders to focus only on the VR content, though. The device is also quite small and lightweight. I like the black color with the blue light: it makes the device pretty elegant to see.
The headset can be worn thanks to a halo strap that goes around your head and that you can close with a knob. There are a few other adjustments that you can make to make it perfectly fit your face shape.
As soon as I put the headset on, I understood things were not going as I had hoped for. Apart from the front module, the rest of the headset didn’t feel very premium to me: the blinders, for instance, were made of flimsy plastic. It also didn’t feel very stable on my head; it wobbled a bit while I moved, and this left me with the constant fear of making it fall and having to repay $20K to Canon by giving them a kidney.
The headset was connected to a powerful laptop. But the connection was not direct: there was a need for a big box. The box was in the middle between the laptop and the headset and guaranteed that the performance of the VR experience was good. I think the last time I heard about boxes to connect a VR headset to a laptop was like 2018, so I felt this to be very weird. But hey, you have to do everything to have a premium experience.
And, well, the premium experience was… not exactly as I imagined. This headset has a per-eye resolution of 1920×2160 (less than the Quest 3), and a field of view of 58° horizontal and 60° vertical (so less than 85 diagonal). Yes, you’ve read these numbers correctly, too. This means that the field of view is low, but the pixel density is actually pretty good. But while trying the headset, I’ve found both the virtual elements and the passthrough to be surely decent, but not mind-blowing or superior to what I tried on other competing headsets.
But there is even more: the experience needed a marker on the floor to center the 3D model. It seems Canon really likes markers… but at least in this case the tracking was working also when the cameras were not framing the marker. The tracking was definitely not the best: in the demo, I could see a 3D model of a car, and I could navigate around it and inside it. But the tracking was shaking. It was not stable, and I could feel some lag. And to add more fun to the whole experience, if I moved my head a bit too much, there was also motion blur.
I hate to leave negative reviews, so I spent some time today looking for more information and reviews about these glasses, because I thought I might have mistaken something during my tests. Then I found a Reddit comment where his majesty Karl Guttag commented on his experience with this device with this sentence: “The passthrough worked reasonably well, but the combination of features and price makes it a ‘what were they thinking?’ “. And in that moment, I understood that my impressions were actually correct.
I honestly don’t know how I could advise this headset: it’s surely a small and decent device. But it costs $20K, its performance is not top-notch, and it requires a bulky box to be attached to your PC. If we were in 2020, I would have surely found it valuable, but in 2026 this makes little sense. A Varjo XR-4 Focal Edition is in the same price range, and has 3840 x 3744 per-eye resolution, 120° × 105° FOV, 51 pixels per degree, and a passthrough view with an impressive definition I have never seen in any other headsets. The Canon MREAL X1 actually launched in 2022, and its age shows.
And to add insult to injury, I have now a better experience at home with my PC and a Quest 3 than I had with this headset.
I’m pretty sure Canon is offering some services associated with this headset, and I’m also sure that maybe there are some niches where, for some reason, this headset is ideal to use. But in the majority of other cases, I think there are better alternatives. I urge Canon to upgrade its enterprise offering, because this headset feels a bit too dated to be appealing in 2026.
And that’s it for my experience with the crazy Canon devices! Am I not the best blogger for telling you about all these interesting things I try around the world? Then share this article with your friends on social media, so they also can know about these special headsets!