Standalone AR

Standalone AR is augmented reality that runs entirely on the device you are wearing. Everything needed to place virtual content in the real world (the processor, the battery, the cameras and sensors, and the see-through optics) is built into a single headset or pair of glasses, with no cable to a PC and no smartphone doing the work. On this wiki it is treated as one of the main device subtypes of AR, alongside Phone-Powered AR and PC-Powered AR. It is also called self-contained AR or untethered AR.

The appeal is simple: you put the device on and walk around. Nothing tethers you to a desk, and you do not have to keep a phone in your hand. The cost of that freedom is that all the computing has to happen inside a thing you wear on your face, which puts hard limits on how much processing power, battery, and cooling you can fit. Most of what makes a standalone AR device hard to build comes back to that one constraint.

What counts as standalone

The dividing line is where the compute lives. A standalone device does its own tracking and rendering on hardware it carries. The two things it is defined against both move that work somewhere else.

PC-Powered AR treats the headset mostly as a display. A cable (or in some designs a short-range wireless link) carries sensor data to a separate computer, the computer does the heavy rendering, and the finished frames come back to the headset. This buys you the graphics power of a desktop GPU, but you are tied to the machine and the cable.

Phone-Powered AR leans on a smartphone you already own. In its most common form you hold the phone up and look at the augmented scene on its screen; the phone's own chip and camera do everything. Some lightweight glasses also fall here, plugging into a phone for both processing and power.

Standalone AR keeps all of that on the head (or, in a couple of boundary cases discussed below, on the body). That is the whole distinction.

Subtype	Where the compute lives	Power source	Tether
Standalone AR	Onboard, inside the headset or glasses	Onboard battery	None
PC-Powered AR	An external computer	Wall power or the PC	Cable, or short-range wireless, to the PC
Phone-Powered AR	A connected smartphone	The phone (and sometimes a cable to it)	The phone, by cable or wireless

What the device has to do on its own

Pulling a stable hologram into the room is more work than it looks, and a standalone device has to do all of it locally and in real time.

The headset has to know where it is. It runs SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping), tracking its own movement through space while building a map of the room, usually from a set of cameras plus an inertial measurement unit. This is what lets a virtual object stay put on a real table when you walk around it. It also has to understand the geometry of the space, building a mesh of nearby surfaces so content can rest on the floor or hide behind a real wall. The HoloLens documentation calls these out directly as on-device functions: world-scale 6DoF positional tracking and a real-time environment mesh. On top of that sits the actual rendering of the graphics, plus hand tracking, eye tracking, and voice input on the better devices.

All of this runs on a mobile-class chip rather than a desktop one, because that is what fits and that is what the battery can feed. The original Microsoft HoloLens paired an Intel Atom processor with a custom Holographic Processing Unit (HPU) built specifically to crunch sensor data without leaning on the main CPU. HoloLens 2 moved to a Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 plus a second-generation HPU. That HPU is the telling part: rather than hope a phone chip can keep up with constant computer vision, Microsoft added dedicated silicon for it. Qualcomm later took the same idea into its glasses-class designs with a separate co-processor for sensor fusion and computer vision.

Then there is heat and battery, which are really the same problem wearing two hats. The chips doing SLAM and rendering produce heat right next to your forehead, and a device you wear on your face cannot carry a loud fan or a big battery. HoloLens 2 is passively cooled, with no fans at all, and rates two to three hours of active use. Glasses-sized hardware is tighter still. Snap's standalone Spectacles, announced in 2024, weigh 226 grams and run about 45 minutes on a charge, which is the honest cost of doing everything on a chip small enough to sit in an eyeglass frame. Every design here is juggling the same three things: compute, thermals, and runtime. Push one up and another gives.

Representative devices

The devices below are genuinely standalone, but it is worth being precise about what that means, because one common family sits right on the edge of the category.

The two Microsoft HoloLens generations are the clearest case. Both put the entire computer in the headset. Microsoft describes the first HoloLens as "the world's first fully untethered holographic computer" and HoloLens 2 as "an untethered holographic computer." Nothing hangs off them and nothing plugs into them to make them work.

Magic Leap's headsets are the boundary case the task asked about, and they deserve a careful answer. Both Magic Leap One (2018) and Magic Leap 2 (2022) are self-contained in the sense that matters most for this taxonomy: there is no PC and no phone involved. But neither puts the compute on the head. The Magic Leap One's processing and battery live in the Lightpack, a disc-shaped unit worn on a belt or shoulder strap and wired to the headset. Magic Leap 2 does the same thing with a body-worn Compute Pack connected to the visor by a cable. So they are standalone as systems but not head-mounted-all-in-one the way HoloLens is. The split exists for a reason: moving the chip and battery off the head keeps the weight and heat away from your face, which is its own kind of comfort engineering. This wiki's own Magic Leap pages file these under Standalone AR for exactly that reason, and that is the convention followed here, with the cable to the body-worn pack noted rather than glossed over.

Glasses-sized standalone AR is newer and harder, but real products exist. Snap's fifth-generation Spectacles run on two Snapdragon processors with the workload split across both, and Snap is explicit that they "function as fully standalone glasses, requiring no connection to a phone or external processor." TCL's RayNeo X2, shown in 2023, put a Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 chip and a battery into a glasses form factor with microLED displays, and was pitched as the first standalone AR glasses, meaning they need no separate compute device.

It is just as useful to note what does not qualify. Display-only glasses such as the Xreal Air have no onboard processor and no battery; they mirror a screen and draw power from whatever you plug them into, which makes them Phone-Powered AR (or PC-powered) rather than standalone. And Qualcomm's Snapdragon AR2 platform, despite the onboard co-processor, is built around distributed processing: the glasses use a fast Wi-Fi link to offload heavy application processing and rendering to a host phone or puck. Onboard silicon alone does not make a device standalone; the test is whether it can run the experience with nothing else attached.

Device	Year	Standalone?	Compute location	Processor	Notes
Microsoft HoloLens (1st gen)	2016	Yes, fully head-worn	In the headset	Intel Atom + custom HPU	Microsoft calls it the first fully untethered holographic computer
HoloLens 2	2019	Yes, fully head-worn	In the headset	Snapdragon 850 + 2nd-gen HPU	566 g; passively cooled; 2-3 hours active use
Magic Leap One	2018	Yes, but body-worn compute	Lightpack, worn on belt or shoulder	NVIDIA Tegra X2 (Parker)	Self-contained system; compute pack tethered to the headset by cable
Magic Leap 2	2022	Yes, but body-worn compute	Compute Pack, worn on the body	AMD x86 (Zen 2 class)	70-degree diagonal field of view; 1440 x 1760 per eye
RayNeo X2	2023	Yes, glasses form factor	In the glasses	Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1	microLED displays; pitched as first standalone AR glasses
Snap Spectacles (5th gen)	2024	Yes, glasses form factor	In the glasses	Two Snapdragon processors	226 g; about 45 minutes per charge; no phone needed

Where it is used

Standalone AR has found its firmest footing in Enterprise AR, where being hands-free and untethered is the entire point. A technician on a factory floor, a surgeon, or a warehouse worker cannot drag a desktop around or hold a phone, so a self-contained headset that overlays instructions or a remote expert's annotations directly in the field of view is a natural fit. The HoloLens line leaned hard into that market, and Magic Leap 2 is sold mainly to enterprise and clinical buyers. Consumer standalone AR, especially in a glasses form factor, is younger and still working through the compute, battery, and weight trade-offs described above. The category overlaps heavily with Smart glasses, the difference being mostly one of ambition: full spatial AR with world tracking and 3D content, versus lighter notifications-and-camera devices.

See also

• Augmented reality
• Phone-Powered AR
• Microsoft HoloLens
• Magic Leap
• Magic Leap 2
• Smart glasses
• Enterprise AR