This week’s Enhanced World Expo showed a lot of innovative technologies that are technically ‘on sale’, but they are really meant to be a proof of concept that will improve with each generation. Over $1,000 worth of VR and AR devices that look like motherships or your grandparents’ thick goggles on steroids; tactile jackets that hurt you when you hit the game; 3D or 3D screens intended to replace traditional screens; and sunglasses that display exercise information such as speed and time while running.
As soon as the doors to the AWE show opened, I headed straight to the OPPO booth. The Chinese brand Android announced last week that it will do just that Demonstrate AR technology in North America For the first time, I was fascinated. For starters, its augmented reality technology only works with OPPO and . phones OPPO smart watchwhich do not sell here; Could this indicate OPPO’s plans to expand into the US? In addition, I wanted to see what a “consumer-ready” smart glass device would have looked like, since OPPO Air Glass went on sale in China this year.
On the first point, friendly OPPO representatives quickly quelled my conspiracy theory, explaining that the company simply wanted to start raising awareness of its products with the US tech media and the XR community, with no immediate plans to expand.
But my second point stands, because OPPO has already managed to release a file relatively An affordable AR at 5,000 yuan (about $750) – about $250 cheaper than Google Glass 2$650 cheaper than the Lenovo ThinkReality A3 and thousands less than the Hololens 2.
Apple, Meta, Google and other brands are working hard on mixed reality (XR) technology with transit, which means they capture your surroundings with cameras and display them inside an enclosed VR headset with the world’s holographic augments. iris projectAnd the Project Cambriaand Apple AR/VR are all expected in the next couple of years.
But we haven’t seen it right yet smart glasses At a consumer ready price. I was curious if OPPO pulled it off.
Air Glass is a 1 ounce magnetically attached smart mono lens with augmented reality (aR) technology, which means it displays text in your vision but lacks the 3D capabilities of “real” augmented reality glasses. It’s like Google Glass, in other words. Your vision is largely unobstructed, except that the little Spark Micro Projector displays widgets like weather, calendar, live translation, or navigation directions in a small part of your vision.
It is powered by the Snapdragon Wear 4100, the same chip found on many Wear OS . watchesIt has 1400 lumens of brightness, which makes the text appear bright and crisp in your vision.
Switching between tools is simple. Simply slide your finger along the touch interface on the monopod, back and forth to switch between widgets or up and down to cycle through the information on that widget. I will compare it to Ray ban storieswhich lets you tap along the edge to take photos or control music playback.
One advantage is translation. Air Glass microphone captures English or Mandarin speech and transcribes the translation in your field of view. Mandarin to Japanese and Mandarin to Korean will also be available soon. I found it took a few seconds for the translation to appear, but that may be thanks to the convention center’s busy traffic.
Other than that, it looks like a very useful feature if you travel a lot for work. So do other tools like Navigation UI moved to your vision while driving or Teleprompter for reading a speech on stage.
Maybe my only problem is that I haven’t always been able to find nice place Where the text came out clearly, it made me feel like my eyes were tired or crossed seeing the text in only half of my vision. But honestly, most of the augmented reality glasses I tried this week had similar issues even with two lenses, due to the limited field of view. So I don’t hold it against OPPO as much as I do the broker itself.
recently viewed google Live Translate AR glasses At Google I/O 2022, it will likely be based on the Focals by North AR commercial acquired by Google in 2020. The Live Translate tool for the Pixel 6 series works offline in English, French, German, Italian and Japanese, while Google Translate generally works in hundreds Languages.
We don’t know yet when Google will release these glasses or what other features it will support besides translation. But it is possible that OPPO will have plenty of time to improve its hardware and software before Google officially enters the picture, while Google has the advantage of respected language algorithms.
On this note, even if OPPO does not have immediate plans to enter the North American market, it is already selling Rebranded Oppo phones Here via the OnePlus brand. In theory, it could start selling Air Glass or future models after the two phone brands became ColorOS base share. This should, in theory, make the OPPO Air Glass a competitor to what Google calls its own AR glasses.
Right now, I’m not sure if I’ll buy the OPPO Air Glass or Google’s default Glass successor. Both are essentially smartphone accessories, with the mix of immersive notifications and specialized software you’d normally find in my model. Android smart watch — except for the Air Glass costing twice as much as one, and I’d be shocked if Google AR was that much cheaper.
OPPO also showed off its old AR Glass prototype, which is not for sale but has more advanced AR experiences and games. Linked to OPPO phone for power, AR Glass was able to get much better images and more powerful experiences, such as great tower defense game and live translations of fake traffic lights into English.
We’ve tried consumer augmented reality glasses before Noral Light It recreates your phone’s user interface in the world around you, with mixed success. Devices like it and the OPPO AR Glass don’t have much “real-world” use but have more interesting gaming applications and more interesting visuals that make them more likely to catch the eye of disposable techies.
OPPO in partnership with Qualcomm as part of Snapdragon . Spacesan open platform for mixed reality launched at AWE USA 2022. Qualcomm recently launched its own platform Augmented reality glasses prototype Device developers like OPPO can copy and refurbish them as they wish.
So I expect we’ll see more augmented or assistive reality devices from OPPO in the future, and based on their demos, I’m intrigued to see what they’ll do next. Even if I haven’t tried yet Which Augmented reality glasses that seem just as basic or immersive as VR technology does, OPPO was one of the first Android brands to take a picture on an unproven medium. It makes me fascinated to see what other things they will bring to the table in the future.