When you wake up early in the morning, brush your teeth, wash your face, and dress, the weather, temperature, traffic conditions, and top news will automatically appear in front of your eyes to help you start your day. When you walk at a strange intersection in a foreign country and feel confused and overwhelmed, a virtual image suddenly flashes in front of your eyes, guiding you to the right path. These things, which sound very incredible, seem unusually real today.
On December 14, OPPO 2021 Annual Future Technology Conference (OPPO INNO DAY 2021) was officially opened in Shenzhen. On the first day of the event, OPPO released its third AR glasses OPPO Air Glass, and unlike the previous two generations of OPPO AR glasses, OPPO Air Glass is a real energy-producing, cost-controllable, direct-to-consumer conventional product, rather than a concept product that only exists in the promotional video.
The question is, compared with the previous two generations of OPPO AR glasses, what are the characteristics of OPPO Air Glass in terms of hardware specifications and product functions? As OPPO's first mass-produced smart glasses product, can the launch of OPPO Air Glass re-set off the craze for smart glasses? Let's find out.
OPPO AR, to the second place
OPPO wants to launch AR devices for the market, which should be regarded as an open secret in the mobile phone industry. Since 2018, OPPO has continued to sell in the AR field, first launching a developer platform - OPPO ARunit in conjunction with SenseTime and zhejiang university CAD Lab, and then releasing two AR glasses products in succession. Although neither product was officially launched to the market, we can still see OPPO's determination.
As the third AR glasses product officially announced by OPPO, OPPO Air Glass really broke the imagination of many people. From the appearance of the design, OPPO did not adopt the design ideas of the previous two generations of concept machines, OPPO Air Glass is a pair of monocular smart glasses, can not operate independently, the user needs to attach its host to their own glasses frame before it can be used.
Such a unique design is naturally pros and cons, the advantage is that the weight of the OPPO Air Glass body can be reduced, the weight of the whole machine is only about 30 grams, and the split single-purpose design makes it more compact and easy to carry; the disadvantage is that the hardware configuration of this product is affected by the volume limitation of the product, and must be used with the mobile phone, just like the smart bracelet.
Because of this, the hardware configuration of OPPO Air Glass may be much inferior to what you think. According to the official introduction, the machine uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 4100 processor - this is a wearable device chip released by Qualcomm last year, and there is basically no expectation in terms of performance.
However, the machine in the display or hard work, OPPO Air Glass using the current mainstream diffractive optical waveguide technology and silicon-based Micro-LED display, the sesame size of micro-LED micro display hidden in the frame, through the advanced light waveguide lens, so that the light for countless reflections and diffusion, and finally transmitted to the human eye.
Of course, for consumers, the most important thing is definitely the function. The first is the notification reminder function, according to oppo's official demonstration, as long as the user pairs the AR glasses and the mobile phone, it can be set through the Edit Control APP installed on the mobile phone. Users can get the weather, schedule, sports health and other required information through glasses, without having to take out their mobile phones to see.
In addition, OPPO Air Glass also supports navigation functions, teleprompter functions and instant translation, which are basically easy to understand functions. OpPO Air Glass currently supports navigation functions in walking and cycling, and users need to set the navigation route or voice inquiry on the mobile phone in advance to open the navigation mode.
Compared with the navigation on mobile phones and watches, the navigation on OPPO Air Glass reduces the risk of looking down, as long as the glasses are transparent enough and do not block the field of vision, then it is bound to be better in terms of safety and convenience, which is also the most practical function on OPPO Air Glass at present, for those who need to ride frequently, it may even be just needed.
Careful readers should find that at the functional level, OPPO Air Glass is mainly based on information presentation, and user-level AR application scenarios such as AR movie viewing, AR games, AR home and AR shooting, which are often mentioned in the past, should not be supported by the function of this device. This monochrome Micro-LED screen also largely limits the space for this product.
Obviously, compared with the OPPO AR Glass 2020/2021 two generations of products that have no energy production, OPPO Air Glass has done too much streamlining in order to mass production. However, this is also the choice of many domestic manufacturers in desperation, such as Xiaomi's Xiaomi AR smart glasses exploration version released in September this year, which also uses the design scheme of wearable device chip + monochrome Micro-LED screen.
From the perspective of product design, OPPO Air Glass can only be regarded as a form of smart bracelet in essence, and the functions available to users are relatively basic, and the actual application scenarios are limited. Xiao Lei believes that OPPO Air Glass may be the optimal solution that OPPO can give at this stage, but such a product is really difficult to call the real "AR glasses".
The death of AR technology
In fact, the so-called AR glasses are really not a new concept, as early as 2012, Google has launched Google Project Glass, this product has the same functions as smart phones, you can control the camera, video calls and map navigation through sound control, and even surf the Internet, process text information and email, etc., it is not too much to say that it is concentrated on people's various imaginations of wearable devices.
Subsequently, between 2012 and 2015, because of the continuous maturity of the corresponding technology, attracting some giants to enter, the AR industry suddenly entered a period of rapid growth. According to the data, at that time, international technology giants including Google, Microsoft, Microsoft, and Facebook entered the AR field, and thus gave birth to symbolic hardware products such as Microsoft HoloLens. As a result, some AR star startups have received a lot of investment, and Magic Leap alone has raised a total of $2.95 billion.
However, after a moment of prosperity, it is lonely. In the middle of 2015, Google announced that it would stop selling the first version of Google Glass and officially close the Google Glass Explorer program; the following year, the first domestic AR company Otto announced its closure, selling only more than 600 AR glasses in three years; by the end of 2018, foreign countries ushered in the collapse of AR/VR companies, and the development of the global AR industry quickly fell to the freezing point.
Now it seems that there are three main reasons why AR devices are not favored by the market. The first is the technical problem, if you want to do a good job of "AR glasses", you must encounter the contradiction between the fuselage and the hardware. If you think about it, low-power processors, small-size cameras and low-capacity batteries are put together, not only the actual application experience is not good, but the battery life is a major problem that cannot be solved at all.
Second, there is the problem of application. Whether it is the original Google Glass or Magic Leap One, these self-proclaimed "consumer-grade" AR products all have the problems of few functions, poor interaction, lack of use scenarios and application ecology, so they have failed to enter the C-end market. Even Microsoft's HoloLens series products and Google Glass EE2 for the professional population have situations where companies need to develop their own custom specific functions.
The last is the price factor, although these products are positioned as consumer AR products, the price of the original Google Glass is as high as 1500 US dollars (equivalent to 9500 yuan), while the Magic Leap One is priced as high as 2295 US dollars (equivalent to 14600 yuan), even the current most affordable Google Glass EE2 price is still 999 US dollars (equivalent to 6700 yuan), No matter which product is not affordable for ordinary consumers.
Is consumer AR really coming?
Although in terms of technology, Google, Microsoft and other technology companies are certainly better than hardware manufacturers. But when it comes to the consumer market, these hardware vendors may have more say. In any case, if AR products are to be accepted by the market, the most important thing is to control the price to a degree that is acceptable to ordinary consumers, and OPPO, Xiaomi and TCL are well aware of this.
Different from the past consumer-grade AR products, domestic manufacturers choose to start from the more basic function point of the message reminder, give priority to solving the most basic problems of wearing experience and product price, popularize the concept of AR, and let users slowly develop new habits. With the help of a relatively perfect "mobile phone + wearable device" ecology, the development of SLIGHTLY LAGGING AR glasses has crossed the threshold of mass production.
The question is, what about the real consumer-grade "AR glasses"? As things stand now, both Apple and Meta (formerly Facebook) are likely to be the next companies to launch consumer-grade "AR glasses", in which the Meta team introduced a consumer-grade AR device called Project Azeray at the previous Facebook Connect event, which is said to use an unprecedented thin lens design to bring consumers a real AR experience.
As for Apple, although there has been no official news, Apple has been laying out the AR field since 2015, and Cook has been emphasizing the importance of AR technology. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple AR glasses are expected to be released at the WWDC Developer Conference in mid-2022, and then shipped at the end of 2022 or 2023.
From this point of view, in the next two or three years, limited by the development of chips, batteries and other technologies, it is still difficult for us to contact the real consumer-grade "AR glasses", and the so-called smart glasses to replace smart phones are tantamount to castles in the air. However, from the perspective of the actions of various manufacturers, AR has indeed become a potential "new battlefield" for major mobile phone manufacturers to compete for deer. In the end, can "AR glasses" gradually evolve from a new concept product to a mobile phone replacement in some scenarios as domestic manufacturers think? Only time will tell us the answer.