Zhi DongXi (public number: zhidxcom)
Author | Xu Shan
Edit | Yunpeng
How do mobile phone giants step into the door of the metaverse? Smart glasses are becoming the most competitive key. In the second half of 2021 alone, three of the top five domestic mobile phone manufacturers will launch their own new generation of smart glasses.
On December 23, 2021, Huawei launched the first smart glasses equipped with HarmonyOS at the winter flagship new product launch. On December 14, OPPO released a new generation of smart glasses OPPO Air Glass at the Future Technology Conference. Not only that, as early as half a year ago, Xiaomi released the Xiaomi Smart Glasses Exploration Edition on Lei Jun's personal WeChat public account.
▲Huawei smart glasses equipped with HarmonyOS
Unlike the Internet giants in the US market have laid out smart glasses, domestic mobile phone manufacturers have accelerated the update iteration of smart glasses products in the past two years, so the functions and forms of smart glasses are also very diverse, some are just simple voice interaction, and some smart glasses have been applied to advanced display technologies such as optical waveguides. But here we are talking about any smart glasses that can produce interaction other than VR glasses.
With the popularity of the meta-universe concept, the smart glasses track has gradually heated up. Market research firm ImmersivEdge Advisors reports that the smart glasses hardware market will grow to $5 billion by 2025 and $34 billion by 2030. But compared with the VR headset in the same period, which will reach $16 billion in 2026, the road to "getting on the top" of smart glasses is longer.
How can smart glasses become the "new favorite" of mobile phone manufacturers? Why are mobile phone manufacturers optimistic about the smart glasses track? What are the hard-core technologies behind smart glasses that are worth mining? After in-depth investigation of these problems, and exchanges with many practitioners in the industry, and personally experienced some products, we found that smart glasses or mobile phone giants loT new battlefield, and 2021, is only the beginning of this war.
First, holding Huawei, OPPO two new products, pro-test domestic smart glasses how?
In less than a month after the release, I got Huawei's latest third-generation smart glasses and OPPO Air Glass, two smart glasses that OPPO has not yet officially started selling, and experienced it in depth.
▲Packaging of Huawei's third-generation smart glasses and OPPO Air Glass
Different from the cookie-cutter design of smart watches, many manufacturers have played new tricks on smart glasses, such as display lenses + glasses, detachable frames, and various types of magnetic charging boxes. From the frame to the lens, every component on the smart glasses has been "modified" by the manufacturers to create a new pattern.
▲Huawei removable frame design
Let's take Huawei's third-generation smart glasses, OPPO Air Glass and Xiaomi smart glasses exploration version that has not yet been officially released as examples to see what new thinking mobile phone manufacturers have for smart glasses.
1. Huawei: smart glasses = detachable frame + smart headphones
The latest smart glasses released by Huawei and ordinary glasses are not much different in appearance, and the weight is relatively thin and light. But in terms of function, it is not so much smart glasses that the glasses version of TWS headphones is more suitable.
Huawei's smart glasses frame has two speakers at the ear, which are adapted to mobile terminals such as mobile phones, computers, and tablets through Bluetooth, and can be connected to two device terminals at the same time.
Whether you're holding a video conference on your computer or listening to music on your phone, Huawei Smart Glasses can switch between different audio sources in seconds based on the user's usage. If you remove your smart glasses, they will automatically pause playback, reducing power consumption.
In addition, smart glasses can tell you how the weather is today directly in your ear, or play the latest notifications. The charging method of this pair of smart glasses is also more interesting, and there will be two hidden magnetic interfaces at the two pins to connect to the Type-C data cable to help complete the charging and initial pairing.
In terms of chips, after some investigation, we did not accurately find out what chip this smart glasses use, but because the device is more inclined to a TWS headset, Huawei may use an improved version of the audio chip.
▲Huawei smart glasses information summary
In the process of experience, lightness is the first time that we can feel the obvious changes in Huawei's smart glasses. Whether it is the charging method from wireless charging to magnetic charging, or portability, Huawei's third-generation smart glasses are much lighter than the previous two generations of smart glasses.
▲Huawei's third-generation smart glasses physical display
On the other hand, Huawei's third-generation smart glasses have improved their handling of sound. For example, compared with the previous two generations, the third generation of Huawei smart glasses uses a reverse acoustic field acoustic system, in the case of playing 50% of the sound, the people around them can hardly hear the sound played by the smart glasses, which improves the privacy of the sound as a whole.
Moreover, when the hands are covered on the ears, the user can instantly feel that the sound of the smart glasses has a significant qualitative change in sound quality and sound effects.
Health monitoring has always been an important part of smart wearable devices, Huawei's third-generation smart glasses have also introduced cervical spine monitoring function, which will remind you to move in time according to the wearing of glasses to protect the health of the cervical spine.
After a week of experience, the third generation of smart glasses will indeed bring people a lot of surprises, change to a Huawei smart glasses, you will have a pair of glasses and a pair of smart headphones at the same time. However, the overall function is still in a relatively basic stage, and the recognition of touch occasionally fails. In addition, some functions such as answering calls and cervical spine monitoring of Huawei's third-generation smart glasses can only be used through Huawei mobile phones, and there are still large shortcomings in its application ecology.
2. OPPO: Monocular lens design can provide AR map navigation
From the one-piece smart glasses in 2019, to the wired split AR glasses in 2020, and then to the wireless split AR glasses in 2021, OPPO has been exploring its best form on the track of smart glasses.
▲OPPO smart glasses information summary
"After making the second generation of smart glasses, we feel that such glasses are still a bit heavy, and the form of wired connection with mobile phones has also brought a certain impact on the user experience, (such glasses) are still a long way from becoming a glasses that everyone can wear and use every day, so we want to further reduce its weight." Xu Yi, technical leader of OPPO XR, said.
OpPO Air Glass, the smart glasses launched by OPPO this year, adopt a monocular split glasses design, which is mainly composed of a pair of custom glasses, monocular AR smart glasses and magnetic charging base.
▲Huawei's third-generation smart glasses (left) and OPPO Air Glass (right)
OPPO Air Glass is equipped with a Snapdragon 865 chip, using BirdBath optical technology and Micro LED screen. OPPO Air Glass weighs 30g, of which the lens weight is only 6.6g, compared to the previous generation, OPPO's lens weight is reduced by 75%.
Compared with the previous two generations of smart glasses, comfort and toolability have become the keywords of OPPO Air Glass. OPPO not only makes greater optimizations in weight, but also strengthens the tool properties of smart glasses.
"If the mobile phone is a very important key to open the digital world, then the smart glasses of the future are the key devices that can promote the integration of the digital world and the real world." Xu Yi mentioned that this is also one of the reasons why mobile phone manufacturers have entered the smart glasses market.
In daily use, users can switch between different display contents through the touch bar on the left, such as weather, date or map information and various notifications.
▲OPPO Air Glass physical diagram
When connected to the software on the phone, OPPO Air Glass will display the corresponding green display. For example, when you open the AR version of Baidu Maps and set the destination, OPPO Air Glass displays the planned road map and guides you forward. The display screen will also give four directions of southeast, south, and northwest to help users accurately find the location, which is actually the gospel of the "road fool party".
▲OPPO Air Glass map guide function
In some presentations, OPPO Air Glass's teleprompter function allows some users to get information faster.
▲OPPO Air Glass teleprompter function
In the actual experience protocol, there are two places that will surprise me.
First, users can independently adjust the font transparency displayed on smart glasses according to different scenes. If the environment is simpler and the surrounding light is darker, the higher brightness font transparency more clearly shows the content that the user needs.
When walking, the lower brightness of the font transparency not only provides corresponding information, but also ensures that the user can focus on the surrounding environment without being distracted by the content. Moreover, OPPO also created an outdoor glare mode to increase the brightness of the picture by reducing a certain picture quality.
On the other hand, OPPO also provides users with Do Not Disturb mode and glasses mute mode, which can turn off any reminders and ringtone and sound feedback on the glasses side, giving users more choices and reducing power consumption.
▲OPPO Air Glass notification display effect
OPPO Air Glass, as OPPO's third-generation smart glasses product, shows OPPO's multiple thinking about smart glasses, such as how to achieve multiple types of interactions, what device to bear the main computing power, how to bring real use value to users at this stage of smart glasses, we can see OPPO's ideas from this smart glasses.
3, Xiaomi: new products have not been released, the concept is first, smart glasses will integrate 497 parts
Xiaomi's planned smart glasses may be more like people's imagination of smart glasses, with a lightweight appearance, merging real pictures with virtual information. From the perspective of existing materials, the Xiaomi Smart Glasses Exploration Edition also uses Micro LED optical waveguide technology, and the weight of the whole machine will reach about 51g.
In addition, the Xiaomi Smart Glasses Explorer Edition will integrate 497 miniature sensors and communication modules, including a quad-core Arm processor, battery, touchpad, Wi-Fi, camera and so on.
▲Xiaomi smart glasses exploration version renderings
Since Xiaomi smart glasses are still in the concept stage, we cannot feel the practicality of their functions for the time being.
We have counted some basic information of three pairs of smart glasses, from the hardware equipment, Micro LED display is the preferred screen type used by most manufacturers, and the future may also be one of the main hardware of smart glasses.
▲Comparison of smart glasses developed by domestic mobile phone manufacturers
In terms of glasses power adaptation, Huawei adapts to the frame of some fixed categories through customized lenses; OPPO directly provides the right degree by customizing a pair of glasses; at the same time, we also look forward to how Xiaomi will solve the problem of smart glasses power adaptation.
The three smart glasses created by Huawei, OPPO and Xiaomi represent three different directions of the smart glasses market, integrated smart glasses without display units, split smart glasses and integrated smart glasses with display units. Interestingly, Huawei's smart glasses do not belong to the wear category in the display page of its official website, but belong to the sub-category of headphone speakers.
▲Huawei's official website
"Whether it's one-piece or split, it's just a look of the eye, and the most important thing is how the user interacts with the world through the glasses. Different scenarios will put completely different demands on the perception and interaction ability of the device," Xu Yi said.
He gave an example of how, in complex industrial scenarios, users often need stand-alone, all-in-one smart glasses, and such devices require relatively high perception and interaction capabilities. However, smart glasses that are used in daily life, mainly based on information prompts, and do not require too many complex functions are mainly light and thin.
For the future development trend, Xu Yi feels that for a long time in the future, smart glasses may still be borne by mobile phones. But with the development of 5G technology, the smart glasses of the future have the potential to get rid of mobile phones and have the prospect of becoming independent devices.
On the whole, domestic mobile phone manufacturers for smart glasses such a new type of smart wearable devices are still in the exploration stage, and there is no more mainstream product form, and has not entered the large-scale mass production stage for the time being, but each manufacturer has made a certain attempt according to their own technical advantages, and explored different functional directions of smart glasses.
Second, how difficult is it to build smart glasses? Four major technical difficulties have yet to be overcome
At present, smart glasses have four key technologies: interaction technology, tracking technology, calibration technology and display technology.
Among them, calibration technology refers to the determination of some parameters through some measurements and calculations, so as to confirm the mapping relationship between the tracking camera coordinate system and the helmet display screen coordinate system, which will affect how the text information is accurately presented next to the corresponding object. Calibration technology tends to have a high impact on industrial-grade AR glasses, but is less mentioned in consumer-grade AR glasses, so it is not mentioned for the time being.
The screen and optical solutions of display technology have previously been mentioned in the "meta-universe" fire, burned to China's micro-display screens, how the field of view has become larger, how to improve the yield of the waveguide film, how the cost can be further reduced, etc. are all problems that have always existed in the direction of display technology.
This time, we will focus on the technical difficulties of the interaction technology and tracking technology of smart glasses. Interaction is one of the indispensable technologies of smart glasses and one of the key elements that determine the user's use of smart glasses.
Our common interaction methods are voice interaction, gesture and touch. Huawei's smart glasses mainly interact through voice and touch, and lightly touching the frame and pinching the lens foot can trigger different functions.
▲Huawei's third-generation smart glasses touch function
Oppo's smart glasses can also complete different interactions according to gestures and head movements in addition to the interaction mode of voice and touch, but some of the technology is still in the further adaptation stage.
Benefiting from the development of other wearable devices, Xiaomi, Huawei, oppo mobile phone manufacturers have more mature voice interaction solutions, and gradually have new applications in the field of smart glasses.
Gesture interaction for the accurate recognition of images is more demanding, now the mainstream gesture interaction has two technical solutions, one is through computer vision to identify hand feature points, the other is through Google's Project Soli technology, with millimeter radar waves for detection.
According to industry insiders, gesture interaction is still limited by camera technology, image acquisition and related algorithms, and the fault tolerance rate is low, and the user experience still needs to be improved.
In addition to the technical difficulty, gesture interaction for users will also be related to a certain learning cost, how to develop a suitable for smart glasses according to the user's habits, so that users can easily remember and use, is also a very important point.
On the other hand, if smart glasses want to achieve the integration of physical environment and virtual elements, they must be able to track the corresponding environment in real time. The current mainstream visual tracking technology includes image-based tracking, object-based tracking, and synchronous positioning and map construction (SLAM).
Previously, Facebook had filed a patent report proposing a light depth sensing system with smart glasses as the carrier. The system can be used for close-up depth sensing through three-dimensional depth mapping, which provides higher resolution and depth mapping than ToF technology.
▲Light depth sensing system
Not only that, according to the statistics of the scientific and technological innovation intelligence SaaS service provider Wisdom Bud, since 2019, Apple has also begun to explore different applications of ball tracking technology in AR glasses/VR devices after acquiring the German eye-tracking company SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI).
Today, Apple and SMI have filed more than 27 patents in the field of eye tracking, covering the level of interaction between users and computers, the level of recording eye movements, the level of displays, the level of optical systems, and so on.
From this point of view, how to create a suitable interactive solution for smart glasses, different manufacturers are looking for new solutions.
Third, the end of the mobile phone manufacturers, smart glasses can really fire?
Smart glasses are not a new product category, in fact, ten years ago, in 2012, Google has launched google project glass, this product has the same functions as smart phones, through the sound control of photography, video calls and map navigation, and even surf the Internet, process text messages and emails.
▲Google Project Glass
However, due to the high cost of project research and development, privacy, security and many other reasons, on January 19, 2015, Google announced the cessation of the Google Project Glass project, and the smart glasses that were expected by everyone returned to silence in the hustle and bustle. However, it has recently been rumored in the industry that Google is restarting the AR smart glasses project and will create a product code-named "Project Iris" internally.
Google's AR glasses also seem to reveal the epitome of the entire smart glasses field. Ten years later, smart glasses are still in the initial exploration stage, and the wearable smart device VR headset in the same period has been large-scale commercial landing in different fields.
The gap in the field of R&D and design of domestic smart glasses is also one of the important reasons hindering the development of smart glasses.
It is understood that the domestic smart glasses manufacturers independently complete the research and development design is not much, some smart glasses companies in the production and processing still stay in the dependence on foreign imported machinery and equipment and the introduction of related production technology, especially in the optical machine and display lenses, some industry insiders revealed that domestic smart glasses manufacturers have not completely got rid of the dependence on imports for the time being.
Although the domestic start in smart glasses is late, manufacturers are still working hard. OpPO Air Glass uses OPPO's self-developed Spark micro optical machine, which compresses the size of the optical machine to the size of a coffee bean, and has an average eye brightness of 1400 nits. Xiaomi's smart glasses use the display scheme of domestic Sunny Optics, which can achieve 640×480 resolution, 29 degrees of field of view, and a peak brightness of 2 million nits, but it is reported that the lenses of British manufacturer WaveOptics will be used.
In terms of OEM, Foxconn, ZTE, BYD and Goertek all cover the OEM of smart glasses.
This time, a number of domestic mobile phone manufacturers have entered the smart glasses market, or injected new vitality into smart glasses. At the same time, some of the strong in niche fields, such as Boss, Bose, Epson, North, Nreal and many other manufacturers have gradually iterated their own smart glasses.
▲ Smart glasses on the market today
According to a survey report on AR glasses released by data analysis and strategy consulting firm Digi-Capital in 2019, consumer AR glasses now face five major challenges: the lack of a "hero device", all-weather battery life, mobile network connection application ecology and price. Although AR glasses are a sub-category of smart glasses, overall, these challenges are also the main reasons why the smart glasses market is not a climate.
According to ImagesivEdge, smart glasses will replace smartphones as everyday electronic assistants for many people. With the enhancement of device functions and the reduction of prices, smart glasses will affect many aspects of work and daily life.
Conclusion: The three major mobile phone giants promote the development of smart glasses
The smart glasses launched by a number of mobile phone manufacturers this year let us see that the smart glasses market is quietly changing. Although mobile phone manufacturers such as Huawei, OPPO, and Xiaomi have different views on smart glasses, lightweighting has become the direction of manufacturers' concerted efforts. However, from the perspective of function, the functions of smart glasses can basically be realized through other mobile devices, which is more replaceable.
At present, some large companies are working on smart glasses technology. Apple, Meta, Lenovo, Panasonic, Samsung, Texas Instruments and many others hinted or revealed plans to launch trendy smart glasses in the coming years. Nowadays, mobile phone manufacturers such as Huawei, OPPO, and Xiaomi have begun to try to lead the smart glasses market, not only broadening their product classification and covering people, but also seizing market share.
On the other hand, the scope of application of intelligent wearable devices continues to expand, from smart headphones and smart watches to smart glasses and smart rings, and the items worn by people in the future will become intelligent. In 2020, the scale of China's Internet of Things market has exceeded 2 trillion yuan, and the national Internet of Things end users are 400 million households, based on the development of China's Internet of Things, the application field of smart wearable devices will become more and more extensive in the future.