On December 14th, the most grand and highest technology event in the OPPO Group, "Future Technology Conference 2021", was officially held. At last year's Future Technology Conference, we saw the imaginative "OPPO X scroll screen mobile phone 2021", and also saw some algorithms and new technologies at the product level, but it is a pity that several products exhibited last year did not achieve mass production, only existed in the promotional video.
In contrast, this year's future science and technology conference is indeed "more dry goods", especially in the landing of technology, OPPO's steps have been even greater. At the bottom technical level, OPPO brought a self-developed NPU chip "Mariana X" with high technology content, and announced the landing plan of the chip, and the new machine equipped with the chip can meet with us as soon as next spring.
At the level of mass production products, OPPO also released a new generation of AR glasses "OPPO Air Glass" at the event on the 14th. This AR glasses have achieved smaller size, lighter weight, and the shape design is more in line with the shape of conventional glasses, and more importantly, it can finally be mass-produced and commercialized, which is also one of the few portable AR devices in the domestic head technology company lineup that truly lands.
However, in OPPO's activities, it is still indispensable that of course it is "future technology", and this exhibition is the "pop-up telescopic camera" technology, which can simply allow the outsole sensor to occupy a relatively large space to load onto the thin and light mobile phone, as far as possible to reduce the impact on the thickness of the mobile phone. However, there is no specific commercial timeline for this technology.
At the press conference, we also experienced these new products, especially OPPO Air Glass.
In terms of wearing, OPPO Air Glass is actually very similar to conventional glasses, and the device consists of two main parts, namely the glasses frame and the AR glasses host. The spectacle frame is divided into two kinds of lenses and no lenses, and the number of lenses can be determined, and I personally believe that oppo should cooperate with the glasses company in the future to launch myopia glasses dispensing services.
Air Glass host and frame between the magnetic connection, after the successful connection of the content information can be displayed through the sapphire lens on the host, after wearing glasses, the right eye can see the information superimposed into the real world, which is the so-called "AR display".
At the functional level, OPPO Air Glass is mainly based on information presentation, and the main application scenarios are in pathfinding navigation, weather and reminder information display, etc., to assist in the role of entering our lives. As for more severe application scenarios such as games, oppo Air Glass's function should not be supported, and it can be seen that its own positioning is a mild application of life assistance, which helps us better handle part of the work.
After trying it on and simple experience, Xiao Lei feels that OPPO Air Glass is really good to use in some scenarios, such as speeches, face-to-face foreign language communication, etc. AR glasses, a relatively insensitive smart wearable device that allows us to better solve these problems, and the whole experience process is also quite natural.
Of course, the entire industry is exploring AR or XR scenarios, and specific products cannot be perfect. For example, the current OPPO Air Glass is still slightly bulky, the future needs to be further miniaturized, miniaturized and non-inductive, followed by endurance and information processing capabilities to be improved, which requires upstream manufacturers, especially chip manufacturers, to accelerate the research and development of high-performance low-power chips, in short, there are still many places that can be improved up and down the entire industry chain.
Then let's talk about the self-developed chip, which now has an official name, called "Mariana X". "Mariana" is the project code name of OPPO's self-developed chip, and as the deepest known in the world, it also means that the project is extremely difficult. From the finished product, OPPO this NPU is indeed amazing, at least in specific occasions its performance has surpassed a number of chip manufacturers, we are very much looking forward to how much improvement this chip can bring to our photos after the actual landing.
In terms of parameters, Mariana X uses TSMC 6-nanometer process to build, according to OPPO related sources, a tape-out cost of nearly 100 million yuan, it is conceivable that OPPO self-developed chips are still very large. In addition, Mariana X uses the DSA architecture, OPPO believes that this chip architecture can bring higher processing efficiency, in the targeted scene (image) can play a higher performance.
It is reported that the Mariana X can enable OPPO mobile phones to achieve 4K+20bit RAW+AI+Ultra HDR parallel capabilities, which is more powerful than the general NPU in the current new generation of Snapdragon 8, Tianji 9000 and other new flagship SoCs. OPPO also said that whether it is the direction of developing image NPU or developing these capabilities, it is aimed at the needs of OPPO products themselves. It is not difficult to see that OPPO's fire fight on the image road has finally reached the stage of real knives and real guns, and mariana X chip will also become the basis and premise for the future development of OPPO mobile phones.
What the? Are you still waiting for the folding screen phone Find N? Sorry, OPPO intends to release this new product on the afternoon of the 15th, and it is also led by Liu Zuohu, so all the content released today is OPPO Air Glass, Mariana X chip and so on. However, on these products, I personally feel that it is enough to support the theme of "Future Science and Technology Conference", and the combination of future technology and landing products also makes the "Future Science and Technology Conference" not only focus on the future, but also focus on the present.
In the past, OPPO was named "OPPT" because of the problem of product landing, but with the announcement after today's conference that AR glasses and self-developed chips will land in 2022, such doubts will certainly be much less in the future. In any case, for technology companies, the reputation of the good or bad and product strength is directly related, when OPPO's new technology can be successfully landed and bring a good experience, I believe that in the market will definitely be recognized by consumers.