Sightful Spacetop: Impressive AR display... until the bugs show up

I'd like to see Sightful’s AR solution succeed, but it’s not there yet.

- BY MARK HACHMAN

Sightful’s Spacetop, a gigantic augmented-reality supplemental monitor for your PC, succeeds as a concept. But it still needs some fine-tuning before you'll be completely happy with it, especially at the price Sightful is charging.

SO, WHAT IS THE SIGHTFUL SPACETOP EXPERIENCE?

Imagine looking through a swim mask at the night sky, made up of a regular grid of small stars. Upon this grid floats a small taskbar and various Windows windows, which you can move around and drag, just like a desktop. Spacetop functions as a massive virtual screen that seamlessly replaces your laptop's monitor. Look up, down, and to the sides, and you can see your windows and apps. There's a small floating taskbar for in-Spacetop navigation. You can run Teams or Slack in one corner and Outlook in another since it's all in Windows. Instead of a swim mask, however, you're using a pair of XReal augmented-reality glasses.

Does it work? Absolutely.

However, I felt like I was wrestling with the interface as much as using it, which isn't a strong endorsement. There are workarounds. The biggest obstacle to this review, sadly, was probably myself—a product of the pre-PC educational system.

Sightful concept art showing what it's like to use the Spacetop. It's pretty close to the real thing.

THE SPACETOP BUNDLE: OUT OF THE BOX AND SETUP

Sightful debuted Spacetop in May of 2023 (fave.co/42vdRSm), when it was a quasi-headless laptop with the XReal glasses directly built into the device. Since then, Sightful has retooled the device to run as a subscription-based app on top of a new generation of AI PCs and made the Sightful app Windows native. (Before, the Sightful Spacetop was essentially a Chromebook.)