OPPO will release smart glasses with micro LED projector in China next year
OPPO will demonstrate glasses with a built-in micro LED projector at its Inno Day 2021. Wearers receive notifications from a connected smartphone via the glasses, and the Air Glass also offers translation and navigation functions. OPPO will release the glasses in China next year.
The OPPO Air Glass weighs 30 grams and is a module that must be placed on a glasses frame. The housing of the glasses contains a micro LED projector that, according to OPPO, has a volume of 0.5 cm³ and is therefore about the size of a coffee bean. The projector uses a lens with five glass lens elements and a microLED panel with 4 micron pixels. The manufacturer does not mention the resolution.
OPPO claims that the LEDs of the micro LED projector achieve a brightness of three million nits. The image is projected on an optical waveguide in the glass of the glasses and that enlarged image has a brightness of up to 1400 nits. According to OPPO, the glasses project with 256 ‘gray tones’.
The glasses must be paired with an OPPO smartphone or smartwatch and it is then possible to see notifications, navigate with Baidu, display text and translate spoken text. Those translation functions work with Chinese and English and later there will be support for Japanese and Korean.
The glasses contain a Snapdragon Wear 4100-soc, two microphones and support for WiFi and Bluetooth. There is a touch bar on the housing for touch control, but also operation via voice control and head movements is possible. When users receive a notification on their smartphone, they see it small in the image in the glasses, for example. By pressing the touch bar, the notification is displayed in large. The same can be achieved by nodding the head. Shaking the head closes the notification.
With the accompanying Control app for smartphones, the brightness of the screen and the volume of the built-in speaker can be adjusted. OPPO is going to make a Smart Glass SDk available to developers; This gives them, among other things, access to a modified version of Baidu Maps for use with the glasses.
OPPO aims with the Air Glass on the Chinese market. The glasses will be released in a ‘limited edition’ in the first quarter of 2022. It is not yet known whether the Air Glass will later be released in other parts of the world.
The OPPO Air Glass is an assisted reality glasses according to the manufacturer. It is therefore not about augmented reality glasses, in which the image shown in the glasses is combined with the representation of the real world. Prototypes of augmented reality glasses have already been shown by OPPO at its Inno Day in recent years, but they have not been released so far.
Video starts with presentation OPPO aR Glass