The 'big idea' SAAS that I am working on involves building data displays for phone connected Smart Glasses. To this end, I need at least one working hardware solution to test the idea with.
I recently upgraded my phone from a Motorola Edge 30 Pro to a Google Pixel 9 Pro X, and I was annoyed to find out that my Viture One smart glasses, which worked fine with the Moto, no longer worked with the Pixel. I've been spoiled by the screen mirroring support on Moto and Samsung devices in the past and didn't consider that this wouldn't be a standard feature in flagship phones. Well, Google proved me wrong on that one. It turns out that screen mirroring support on Pixels is much less solid than that for Samsung and Motorola devices.
The good news is that the Pixel 9 Pro XL does work with Viture Pro glasses. These also have a bigger , brighter display so (apart from the out of pocket cost) so it is a better overall outcome, but it does have the downside that out-of-the-box the only way to get the glasses to work well on the Pixel is to use Viture's Spacewalker application. If you don't mind having to use Spacewalker then the Pixel 9 Pro XL + Viture Pro make a great combination.
The only downside of this is that you have an extra layer to deal with, and you need to use the embedded Spacewalker browser to access web based content.
For my solution, I also want to be able to minimize the steps required to launch a display, and I also want the option of using either Chrome or my own application to host the display. This means that I want to be able to mirror the phone display directly to the glasses.
This is supported out-of-the-box for Moto and Samsung devices, but doesn't work for the current (June 2025) release of Android 16 on the Pixel 9. However, it is possible to get this working if you follow some extra steps
1) Opt into the Android beta program and install Android 16 QPR Beta 2.1 on your phone
2) Enable developer options, and ensure that the 'Enable Desktop Experience features' option is _disabled_
3) Install a rotation manager (e.g. Rotation Control) to force the phone into landscape mode
After following those steps, my Pixel 9 Pro XL now mirrors very nicely to the Viture Pro glasses!
The desktop mode that Google are teasing in Android 16 is interesting, but it needs a mouse/keyboard attached to the phone to work. This could be worth experimenting with to create a smart glasses based 'cyberdeck' in the future, but for now I want to focus on just creating low-friction heads up data displays.
