As an exhibition with the theme of "communication", XR hardware has obviously become the "guest of honor" at the 2023 Mobile World Congress (MWC2023): the high speed, low latency, and high reliability supported by 5G will greatly promote the popularization of XR hardware and scenarios, and make it prosperous. Unlike previous manufacturers' exhibits of "only far view" concept products, many companies have brought easy-to-use and practical AR glasses this year; Ecological upstream chips and operators that uphold an open and win-win attitude are also jointly planning future application scenarios of AR/MR hardware.
AR glasses are moving towards ease of use
As a new category of consumer products strongly related to mobile phones, AR glasses have become the focus of MWC in recent years. This year, OPPO, Xiaomi, ZTE's Nubia, TCL Electronics Incubated Thunderbird Innovation all showed their latest AR glasses. From the first impression iteration of the original product with a small field of view, bulkiness, and poor practicality, the AR glasses exhibited this year have reached a new level in terms of practicality.
"At present, companies in the AR industry have more and more actions and products, and as a whole, the big industry cycle has arrived." Li Hongwei, CEO of Thunderbird Innovation, said.
Earlier, various mobile phone manufacturers collectively threw an olive branch to AR glasses: Huawei, OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi and other mobile phone manufacturers have successively released AR glasses. "XR glasses are currently what we think is the most suitable meta-universe, or the entrance device to the future Internet, which is why OPPO chose to make a long-term layout in this field. In fact, in 2014, OPPO began to invest in research and development in the XR field. OPPO XR technical director Xu Yi said frankly in an interview with the media earlier.
The audience tried on the nubia Neovision Glass
Nubia, which is belated this year, released its AR glasses for the first time at MWC2023, the AR glasses aim at the function of watching movies on the go, you can connect to the mobile phone through the USB cable, and enjoy the 120-inch virtual giant screen viewing experience at any time, in terms of product performance, AR glasses have both stereo headsets and high-definition giant screen performance, the body is only 79g, comfortable and portable.
At MWC 2023, Thunderbird's X2 AR glasses and OPPO's Air Glass 2 both expanded new features beyond movie viewing. Among them, OPPO positions Air Glass 2 as an "intelligent assistant" in personal life, which can support prompting and translation; Navigation, reminders, speech-to-text and other functions make information visible and available to people instantly and conveniently. Thunderbird X2 is equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 professional computing chip platform, and equipped with a 16-megapixel camera, supporting advanced functions such as GPS navigation, SLAM, gesture recognition, etc., and can also take photos and videos to record moments in users' lives from a first-person perspective.
In addition, Xiaomi also released an exploratory version of wireless AR glasses. Notably, this AR glasses explores a new way to connect wirelessly: AR glasses can quickly connect to mobile phones via NFC technology. The AR glasses are equipped with a near-"retina-level" ultra-high-resolution display, and with "micro-gestures", users will be able to easily control between virtual and real space.
Ecosystem partners plan future application scenarios
MWC not only attracted hardware manufacturers to display their products to "show muscles", but also built a platform for upstream manufacturers and partners such as Qualcomm and Samsung to jointly explore new application scenarios of XR.
Qualcomm, which has been working on VR/AR computing platforms for many years, announced at MWC 2023 that it is working with seven global telecommunications companies, namely China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, KDDI Corporation, NTT QONOQ, T-Mobile, Telefonica and Vodafone, to create next-generation AR glasses that are directly compatible with users' smartphones. It is reported that Qualcomm's goal is to create split AR glasses, and open up and accelerate the connection between AR glasses and smartphones. In addition, Qualcomm and KDDI of Japan have reached a multi-year cooperation - focusing on expanding XR use cases and creating a developer program in Japan.
"We believe that XR will eventually reach a market size comparable to smartphones, with a profound impact on society." Hou Mingjuan, global vice president of Qualcomm, emphasized when attending the 2022 World VR Industry Conference, "In the future, we look forward to making XR glasses devices more thin and comfortable to wear to achieve an immersive spatial computing experience." Hou further elaborated that XR devices not only need to be very thin and sleek form factors, but also need to balance performance and power consumption, and support new ways of perception and interaction.
During MWC, Goertek also cooperated with Qualcomm Technologies to launch the first AR glasses reference design based on the Snapdragon AR2 platform for mass production. The weight of the new reference design has been reduced to less than 100g; With Wi-Fi 7 connection, the delay between AR glasses and the terminal (smartphone) is reduced, and the delay can be maintained below 2ms for work, and the energy consumption of the whole machine is also lower.
Another consumer electronics giant, Samsung, also announced during MWC 2023 that it is working with ecological partners to "develop" the development roadmap of MR devices.
Samsung has entered into partnerships with Qualcomm and Google on MR technology
In an interview at MWC 2023, Patrick Chomet, executive vice president of Samsung Electronics, highlighted the partnership between Samsung, Google and chip giant Qualcomm in the MR field, although he did not disclose the details of the cooperation between the three, he reiterated that the three companies will continue to pay attention to MR technology. Chomet said: "We can do terminal equipment, Qualcomm can do chipsets, Google can do operating systems. But ultimately, we need more than that, but a vibrant ecosystem. ”
What's new at MWC 23
MWC 23 | Big coffee talks about the future of the communications industry
Author丨Wang WeiEditor丨Qiu Jiang Yongmei Editor丨Maria Executive Producer丨Zhao Chen