Oppo is jumping on the Ar bandwagon after unveiling its Air Glass eyewear that unlike its previous eyewear concepts, will be launching in 2022.
Unveiled at its latest future gazing Inno Day event, the Air Glass looks like a modern take on Google Glass and appears to be an evolution of the Oppo AR Glass concept it unveiled at last year's event. This time though, it's referring to this device as delivering an 'assisted reality' experience as opposed to an augmented reality one.
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It's delivering that assisted reality through a monocle design that weighs just 30 grams and features scratch resistant sapphire crystal glass. That monocle can fit into either black or silver frames and uses waveguide display technology along with what Oppo's calling a Spark Micro Projector that packs an exceptionally bright Micro LED chip to deliver a 640 x 480 resolution image onto that waveguide display.
With that display you'll be able to use the eyewear to navigate your way around, view notifications, keep tabs on health data, use it as a teleprompter and turn to it for live speech-to-text translation.
Interestingly, it will support multiple ways of control letting you touch, talk and use motion controls to interact with the assisted reality device. It can also be controlled by Oppo's smartphones and the Oppo Watch, letting you navigate the display from your wrist too.
The Air Glass will be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear 4100 platform, which is currently used to power a host of Google's Wear OS smartwatches including the Oppo Watch 2 and the TicWatch Pro 3. Quoted battery life is around 3 hours when in use with a larger 40 hours in standby mode.
It's getting a limited release in China in the first part of 2022, though there's no price attached to it just yet. We imagine Oppo will be looking to see how much appetite there is for the unique device before considering if this is one to take global.
2022 could be a big year for AR with Apple strongly tipped to enter the augmented reality hardware space for the first time. We're sure the likes of Apple, Samsung, Google, Huawei and others will be keeping a close eye on how well Oppo's assisted reality efforts are received when it goes on sale.
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By Michael Sawh
Michael Sawh has been covering the wearable tech industry since the very first Fitbit landed back in 2011. Previously the resident wearable tech expert at Trusted Reviews, he also marshaled the features section of T3.com.
He also regularly contributed to T3 magazine when they needed someone to talk about fitness trackers, running watches, headphones, tablets, and phones.
Michael writes for GQ, Wired, Coach Mag, Metro, MSN, BBC Focus, Stuff, TechRadar and has made several appearances on the BBC Travel Show to talk all things tech.
Michael is a lover of all things sports and fitness-tech related, clocking up over 15 marathons and has put in serious hours in the pool all in the name of testing every fitness wearable going. Expect to see him with a minimum of two wearables at any given time.