--- title: "48 TOPS in your pocket: what should stay local" url: "https://kyberfusion.com/blog/what-stays-local" description: "XREAL Aura carries a 48 TOPS puck, cameras and four microphones. What its assistant computes locally is not published. Here is how we think about the split." --- # 48 TOPS in your pocket: what should stay local October 13, 2026·4 min read·Editorial team Plain folded display glasses cabled to a rounded pocket compute puck, a rounded server unit with four small coloured lights behind them You are standing at a parts shelf with a pair of display glasses on, and you ask the assistant which of the three boxes in front of you matches the order on your screen. The answer arrives in a second. Somewhere in that second, a camera frame, a few words of speech and a piece of the order were turned into an answer. Where did that happen: in the puck on your belt, on a server, or partly in both? With [XREAL Aura](https://www.xreal.com/aura), the hardware makes the question sharper than usual. The glasses carry two tracking cameras, a high-resolution camera with a privacy light for real-time perception, and four microphones. The cable runs to a compute puck with a Qualcomm Snapdragon Reality Elite rated at 48 TOPS for SI work, 12 or 16 GB of memory and a 4455 mAh battery. The assistant is Gemini on Android XR, which XREAL describes as understanding what you see, helping with tasks in context, opening apps and helping with Maps. A lot of capability sits on your body. How much of the assistant’s work it actually does is not published: XREAL does not say which parts run on the puck and which go to the cloud. That is worth asking, not guessing. ## The real cause: the split is a business decision Whether work runs locally or in the cloud is rarely a question of what the chip can do. It is a question of who runs the model, who pays for it and who learns from the result. A large model in a data centre is easier to update, cheaper to improve and more capable on hard questions. A small model on the device is faster, works offline and keeps the frame where it was taken. Most products choose both and draw the line somewhere they do not show you. A spec sheet tells you what the hardware could do locally. It does not tell you what the software does. ## Where “it has a powerful chip” misleads **Local by spec sheet, cloud by default.** A 48 TOPS figure describes capacity, not behaviour. A device can have plenty of local compute and still send the hard questions away, which are usually the ones that matter. **The camera stream is the heaviest and the most personal.** Speech can be short. A frame contains the shelf, the screen beside it, the colleague walking past and the document on the desk. Whatever leaves the device leaves with all of that. **Context is metadata.** Even when content stays local, the fact that you asked, when, where and how often can travel. GPS on the puck and a wearable that knows it is being worn make that context rich. **Silent fallback.** When local work is not enough, many systems quietly hand it to the cloud. Without a record, you cannot tell the difference between a private answer and a convenient one. **One answer for everyone.** The split is set by the product, not by you, and it is the same for a grocery list and a medical letter. ## How KyberFusion is designed to draw the line KyberFusion is the network layer of the Kyber ecosystem: a sovereign cloud built so that a node sees work, not a person. It starts from the other end of the question. The default is local, and leaving the device is a step that has to be justified and recorded. **The assistant decides, per task, and says so.** KyberBot looks at what a task needs before anything leaves. Most of what glasses ask for, such as reading a label, matching a box to an order or summarising what you just said, is meant to stay on the device or your [home node](https://kyberdeck.com/blog/the-home-node). The trade-offs for agent work are set out in [where a swarm should run](https://kyberagent.com/blog/where-a-swarm-should-run). **Strip before you send.** When a task does go out, it goes as a sealed KyberCell with only what the work needs: a crop instead of a frame, a question instead of a conversation. What a node should and should not see is spelled out in [what a cloud node knows about you](https://kyberfusion.com/blog/what-a-node-knows-about-you). **A record of where every step ran.** Each step is logged as a trajectory, including whether it ran on the device, on your node or in the network, and the record comes back to you. **The same system on every hop.** The device, the node and the cloud node run the same KyberLinux, so the rules that keep an agent in its cell do not change when the work moves. The reasoning behind that is in [the same OS in the cloud](https://kyberlinux.com/blog/kyberlinux-as-a-fusion-node), and what an open puck with ADB does and does not give you is in [a pocket computer with ADB](https://kyberlinux.com/blog/a-pocket-computer-with-adb). Kyber does not integrate with Android XR, and nothing here describes how Aura works. It is how we think about the same split for our own system. The stream behind the glasses is the subject of the companion piece, [the cloud behind your eyes](https://kyberfusion.com/blog/the-cloud-behind-your-eyes). ## The honest limits KyberFusion is pre-launch. There is no network to join, and “anonymous” is a goal the system is built for, not a result. Local models are smaller, and some questions will be answered worse on the device than in a large data centre; we would rather say that than pretend otherwise. And for a European reader: Aura’s first wave ships to the US, Canada, Japan and South Korea, with other markets in 2027. Poland and the rest of the EU are not on the first list. ## A test you can run today Take the assistant on your phone, the one most likely to end up behind your glasses, and switch on airplane mode. Then ask it ten things you would ask glasses: read this label, what is this part, set a timer, summarise my last message, translate this sign. Write down which ones still work. Everything that fails offline goes somewhere else to be answered, with whatever was in the frame or the sentence. For each of those, ask yourself whether you would be comfortable with the shelf, the screen and the person in the background going along. That list is the line you would want drawn, and it is worth comparing with the one the product draws for you. The [KyberFusion homepage](https://kyberfusion.com/) describes the network we are building for the part that has to leave. - XREAL Aura - Android XR - on-device - cloud - KyberCell ## Keep reading - [The DAO decides: who votes on the token price](https://kyberfusion.com/blog/the-dao-decides-who-votes-on-the-token-price) - [How a node proves it computed honestly](https://kyberfusion.com/blog/how-a-node-proves-it-computed-honestly)