Upgrade your summer soccer watch party with these top tech gadgets

It’s officially watch party season, especially with a certain special soccer event happening right about now. To celebrate the occasion, we’ve partnered with brands producing some cutting-edge tech to show you the ultimate soccer watch party setup.

Here’s the part of hosting a watch party nobody puts on the invite. Hours before anyone shows up, you’re skimming leaves, scrubbing walls, and wondering how the floor got that bad when nobody’s even been in yet. And yet the pool is the centerpiece — the whole reason you’re hosting outside in the first place.

The WYBOT S3 is built to make that problem disappear entirely. It’s a cordless robotic pool cleaner, but calling it that undersells what it actually does. WYBOT claims it’s the world’s first pool robot to combine full 3D mapping, AI-guided cleaning, automatic self-docking, self-charging, and self-emptying in a single system, and on paper at least, nothing we’ve seen disputes that.

The smarts start on the first run. The S3 uses 36 onboard sensors to map your pool in three dimensions, then uses that map to plan an efficient cleaning route for every subsequent cycle, covering floors, walls, and up to the waterline. In AI Vision Mode, it goes further, actively detecting debris and adjusting its path on the fly for floor cleaning. You can watch it all happen in real time through the app, redirect it to specific areas if needed, or just leave it to do its thing.

When it’s done, it returns to the dock on its own and recharges via a dual solar and DC power system, transferring all collected debris into a shore-based 10-liter bin. No pulling a dripping robot out of the water by hand. The bin uses a dual-layer filtration system, with a 180μm filter and a 40 PPI sponge handling everything from leaves down to fine particulates. Under typical conditions, WYBOT says you only need to touch the thing roughly once a month.

That’s the whole pitch, and it’s a compelling one. Guests show up, the water’s spotless, and you didn’t think about it once. For anyone who hosts regularly and wants their outdoor space to actually reflect the effort they’ve put into it, the S3 makes a strong case for itself.

The WYBOT S3 is available now at a pre-sale price of $2,499.99, reduced from its regular retail price of $2,999.99.

Every watch party has that one guest everyone’s talking about. At this one, it’s not human!

The AGIBOT X2 Ultra is a half-sized humanoid robot, and we invited it to this watch party as basically a guest from the future. It goes by Lumi. Within about a minute of arriving, everyone at the party has their phone out to capture what they’re seeing, and that’s before it’s even done anything impressive.

The X2 Ultra moves with a fluidity that immediately sets it apart from the stiff, jerky robotics most people picture. That’s down to its 31 degrees of freedom, which allow for genuinely human-like rhythm across greetings, gestures, and full dance routines. It turns to face whoever is speaking, waves, and even in standby it maintains subtle motion and micro-adjustments, so it never just feels like a prop in the corner. It feels like it’s actually at the party.

The interaction is where it gets genuinely impressive. The X2 Ultra responds to voice, touch, gestures, and visual cues. Ask it something and it answers out loud, in the moment, turning toward whoever is talking. Its Flexible Control means you can naturally guide its arms during a photo or greeting without that rigid, resistant feeling you’d expect. It just moves with you. It can even carry a drink over and hand it right to you so you never have to leave your seat during the game.

For a soccer watch party specifically, the standout moment is the ball interaction. Pass or roll a ball toward it and the X2 Ultra reacts in real time with head tracking and body response. That’s live perception, not a pre-recorded animation. When a goal goes in, it doesn’t just clap — it performs a full dance routine. And if you have multiple units, they can run coordinated group routines in sync, the kind of moment that ends up all over people’s feeds.

It can even run your post-match awards. The X2 has a dedicated presentation mode, carrying a tray out to your player of the match and handing over the trophy itself. AGIBOT also offers the D1, a quadruped companion robot that can play crowd entertainer or haul small items around the party.

The X2 Ultra is a commercial product available through AGIBOT’s partner and sales network.

What if you could watch the entire match on a massive screen without being tied to a wall, a TV, or even a room?

That’s the premise of the INMO Air 3, and it’s a more convincing one than you might expect. These look like a regular pair of glasses. Flat lens, clean eyewear styling, nothing sneaking down to your phone, no external battery brick, no extra hardware to juggle. That’s the whole point of the all-in-one design, and it’s what separates the Air 3 from most AR glasses on the market. INMO calls it the world’s first all-in-one 1080P full-color waveguide AR glasses, and the spec sheet backs that up.

What you’re actually seeing through them is a Sony Micro OLED display running full 1080p at up to 600 nits of brightness, with a 36-degree field of view that INMO renders as a virtual 150-inch screen. It’s vivid, it’s sharp, and it genuinely feels cinematic rather than like a tiny window floating off to the side. The waveguide design also means the image is private by default. Someone walking past just sees a person in glasses. The match is entirely yours.

Because it runs Android 14 on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8-core chip with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, this is a full computing platform on your face, not a display accessory for your phone. That means access to Google Play, your usual apps, and crucially, the ability to mirror or extend a Windows or Mac desktop directly from the glasses. If something urgent comes up mid-match, your actual desktop is right there in front of you. Deal with it and get back to the game without missing more than a minute.

Control is handled by a touchpad that comes in the box, letting you move and resize screens, navigate apps, and manage everything without reaching for anything else. The smart ring is a separate purchase at $159, but if you end up using the Air 3 regularly, it’s the upgrade worth prioritizing. Pointing and clicking through a floating desktop in midair becomes surprisingly natural, surprisingly fast. Heading outside? A sunglasses clip is included in the box, keeping the picture visible in brighter conditions.

The INMO Air 3 is available now for $999, down from $1,099. Use code ANDROIDAUTHORITYNE15 for an additional 15% off, exclusive to this offer.

Here’s the problem with hosting 30 people for a watch party. You’ve got the pool open, the food out, the energy building, and everyone’s supposed to crowd around a TV that was never designed for this. If the screen is the centerpiece of the whole night, it needs to actually be one.

The XGIMI Horizon 20 Max is a triple laser 4K projector, and the number that matters most for an outdoor evening setup is its 5,700 ISO lumens of brightness. That’s enough to hold its own against string lights and the last stretch of evening glow, meaning you’re not stuck waiting until pitch black to fire the match up. It just works when you need it to.

The color is where it genuinely surprises you. The Horizon 20 Max covers 110% of the BT.2020 color gamut, which is a wider range than most TVs even attempt. Grass looks like grass, kits pop with real vibrancy, and combined with a 20,000:1 contrast ratio (with DBLE active), you get genuine shadow detail in night match shots instead of everything collapsing into one dark blur. MEMC motion smoothing keeps fast play clean too. When a counter-attack is on and the ball is flying across the pitch, it doesn’t smear, which for soccer is kind of the whole point.

It doesn’t clock out at halftime either. Someone fires up a game on the big screen and the Horizon 20 Max handles that too, with 1ms input lag at 1080p/240Hz and VRR support. No lag to blame when you lose. The party stays a party.

The part nobody thinks about until guests are walking in is setup. The Horizon 20 Max runs XGIMI’s ISA 5.0 system, which handles auto-focus, auto-keystone correction, intelligent screen alignment, and obstacle avoidance automatically. You set it down, it sorts itself out, and you get back to being a host. Sound is handled by dual 12W Harman/Kardon speakers with Dolby Audio and DTS-HD support, and the whole thing runs Google TV, so Netflix, YouTube, Prime Video, and the rest are built right in.

The XGIMI Horizon 20 Max is available now for $2,699, down from $2,999.