Hands on with the Spacetop at CES 2025

I've had my eyes on the Spacetop ever since I first heard about it. Developed by a startup called Sightful, Spacetop is a software product that promises to give you access to the kind of virtual multitasking experience offered by the Apple Vision Pro at a fraction of the price and using your existing laptop.

When I came across it at CES 2025, I knew I had to slip on a set of smart-specs and try it out. Here's what I made of it.

So many screens! The main draw for the Spacetop is that you can get access to an impossibly large set of virtual displays. without any of the hassle associated with physical ones. While my demo saw me interact with something like half a dozen digital displays, a Sightful representative told me that they’ve tested Spacetop with as many as 40 virtual displays.

Sightful actually thought about prescription lenses! I’ve tried a fair few sets of smart glasses over the past few years and you’d be surprised how often many of the startups involved have failed to consider people the needs of those who already wear glasses. Given that, I was genuinely won over by how quickly the team at the demo station for Spacetop moved to try and set me up with lenses that actually match my current prescription for my session.

Intuitive controls designed to help you maximise your multitasking. It’s one thing to put on a set of glasses and see a bunch of screens that you couldn’t before. It’s entirely another to use the keyboard shortcuts that Spacetop offers to tweak the size and orientation of this layout your liking. It sounds kinda mundane but just having the ability to make the experience my own added a lot to my hands-on with Spacetop.

Subscription fees. I’m not going to lie, this detail really stinks and eats away at a lot of the initial enthusiasm I had for the Spacetop. Putting the currency conversion to the side, $950 a year feels like a pretty steep ask. I suppose it is cheaper than buying a half dozen monitors but I’d much rather an option where I could pay a little more upfront and not deal with yet another subscription. It’s nothing to do with the product itself, but the fact that the Spacetop is a subscription-based service really robs it of some of the simplicity that made it compelling to me in the first place.

Limited field of view. While the core fantasy of slipping on a set of spectacles and gaining the ability to multitask on a laptop anywhere from your office to a plane is more or less intact, the field of view afforded by the Xreal Air 2 Ultra wasn’t as generous as I’d like. It felt like I was craning my neck to look at virtual screens a little bit more than I might have to with a set of comparable physical ones. For what its worth, Sightful have said that they do plan to offer support for other smart glasses later down the line though. As lightweight as the hardware was, I found this aspect of the experience wanting.

While I'm generally feeling pretty positive about the Spacetop after my hands-on experience with it at CES 2025, I can't say that the experience was transformative enough that I can reconcile it with the potential cost involved. Still, Sightful has put a lot of work into the software involved and it shows. It's tricky to make something that's designed for power users and screen sickos feel relatively approachable and I think that this mostly gets there.

Even if I'm leery of the price involved, I can respect what Sightful have done here. I remain hopeful that they'll find an alternative way to sell this thing because the idea of paying for access to a bunch of virtual displays feels like a real stretch even for sickos like myself.

The Spacetop just entered what Sightful are calling a “early access” launch.

As part of this, it is offering US customer a $950 bundle that includes a set of Xreal Ultra 2 AR glasses with custom prescription lenses and a 1 year subscription to Spacetop itself. There’s no word yet on if or when it might look to expand this to other markets.