Yesterday was Oppo’s INNO Day and the company kicked it off by unveiling the OPPO Air Glass. When you look at this device, you are inevitably reminded of the iconic visor from Dragon Ball, as it has a very similar design.
The company describes Air Glass as an “assisted reality” device, as it provides all the information you would normally see on a smartphone, such as notifications of incoming messages, navigation instructions, and any kind of information that can appear in front of your eyes.
The company says it will manufacture all the necessary components itself, including the “Spark Micro Project” mini-projector. This projector is only 0.5 cc and has a metal housing combined with a lens made of sapphire glass. The device weighs around 30 grams and can be used alone or in combination with conventional glasses.
The OPPO Air Glass is equipped with a Snapdragon 4100, a Touch Bar for control, two microphones, and a speaker. At launch, it will only be compatible with the OPPO Watch 2 and smartphones running ColorOS 11 or higher. These devices allow control via voice commands, touch, and head or hand gestures. The lens of the OPPO Air Glass, on the other hand, is 0.7 mm thick and its shape is modeled after the wing of a cicada. This lens reaches a maximum brightness of 1,400 nits and can display a grayscale of 16 or 256 levels. The company estimates that the OPPO Air Glass battery can last up to three hours on a single charge.
The device can be used to answer calls and listen to music, and the company plans to add more features in the future. For example, the company claims that translations can be made in conversations between two people using the device, although at the moment this feature only supports translations between English and Korean, and will very soon support Chinese/Japanese and Chinese/Korean.
OPPO Air Glass is certainly a product that is very close to life. In order to make it easier for consumers to use this product, OPPO Air Glass also provides four interaction methods: touch, voice, gesture, and head movement control, so consumers can freely choose the interaction method according to their own use habits.
At the conference, Liu Chang, director of OPPO Research Institute, said, “In the future, smart glasses will become the most important ‘third screen’ in personal life after mobile phones and watches. We are very happy to launch OPPO Air Glass, a smart glasses that is truly within the reach of consumers.”
Compared to its two previous generations, OPPO Air Glass is a big step towards consumer-grade electronics.
The first manifestation is in the weight. As a wearable product, making the product small, light, and portable will be a major driver for consumers when shopping. In order to achieve this feature, OPPO Air Glass adopts a monocular split design, the overall weight is only 30g, the thickness of the lens is only 1.3mm, truly “light as a feather, as thin as a cicada wing”.
In the display, OPPO Air Glass uses diffractive light waveguide optical solution, with Micro LED screen, in the use of the process can provide up to 3 million nits display brightness, the average eye brightness up to 1400 nits, and equipped with OPPO’s own Spark micro-optical machine – the smallest in the industry. According to reports, this is currently the industry’s smallest optical machine, the size of about the size of a coffee bean, to the maximum extent that OPPO Air Glass to achieve both lightweight and display effect.
OPPO Air Glass also comes with two types of frames, one for people with normal vision and the other for people with refractive disorders.
It is worth noting that although OPPO Air Glass is the third generation AR glasses product released by OPPO, it is OPPO’s first mass-produced AR glasses. The product will be mass-produced in spring next year.
The market for AR glasses is opening-up
The company’s products are expected to become the next generation of large-scale terminals, and TrendForce estimates that global shipments of VR/AR devices will reach 12.02 million units in 2022, with an annual growth rate of 26.4%.
As a near-eye display device, AR glasses have very high requirements for the resolution of display technology; at the same time, to meet the needs of different usage scenarios, AR glasses also need to have higher brightness. Micro-LED does not have advantages in cost in the short term, but it has greater potential than LCD and OLED in terms of resolution and brightness, so micro-LED has also become a powerful display technology for AR/VR/MR devices. VR/MR device display technology is a strong competitor.
Among them, Xiaomi has officially released Xiaomi Smart Glasses Explorer Edition on September 14. The product uses Micro LED display technology and optical waveguide technology to achieve a standalone smart device experience in a body similar to a traditional eye.
Thunderbird Innovation, a new AR company incubated by TCL Electronics, released the Thunderbird Smart Glasses Pioneer Edition on October 15, which is the industry’s first binocular full-color Micro LED holographic light waveguide AR glasses.
Japanese startup Cellid also announced on November 10 that it will start supplying samples of its AR glasses display module “Cellid Waveguide 60”, which features the world’s widest field-of-view micro-LED display with a 60-degree field of view in a light waveguide structure.
Of course, at the current stage of development, Micro LED AR glasses still need to solve the cost problem before it is expected to further open up the market space. However, we believe that after a period of cultivation, AR glasses will become an extremely important application scenario for Micro LED.
The device will launch in the first quarter of 2022 and will only be sold in China for now, although sales are expected to expand to the rest of Asia soon. It remains to be seen if the company will confirm the price of the device in the coming months.