Gadgets

Oppo’s new Air Glass projector will put notifications directly onto your glasses

They will release in China early next year.

by
Joe Rice-Jones
December 14, 2021

Image: Oppo

The Oppo Air Glass was just announced at the company’s Oppo Inno Day 2021. The device is an “assisted reality” product, similar to how Google Glass worked when that was still available.

The one-sided reality projector fits on your glasses and projects 2D information into your field of vision. Perfect for things like turn-by-turn navigation directions, or real-time translation. Oppo also thinks you’ll like to use them as a teleprompter, which is probably correct but then you’d have to wear the device while you’re on camera.

Check it out in action in the announcement video below. The tech involved is pretty cool, with a Micro LED projector that then reflects off some tiny waveguides onto your vision. That projector has a 3 million nits peak brightness (and 1,400 nits average), which is ridiculous if true.

For context, your TV is likely less than 500 nits, with some prototypes reaching 10,000 nits peak brightness. For more comparison, the noonday sun is around 1.6 billion nits.

Powered by the Snapdragon 4100 processor, Oppo says the Air Glass weighs about 1 oz in total. That’s a fairly comfortable weight to wear for the three hours the battery is said to last. Oppo says the battery can last 40 hours on standby.

Two frame designs are available for the Oppo Air Glass, a silver half-frame and a black full-frame, and each of these comes in two sizes. The frame then has a magnetic port so you can attach it to conventional glasses if you wear them.

It wouldn’t be futuristic enough without some level of non-touch control. The Air Glass can be controlled by voice, hand tracking, head tracking, and also touch, and from a Smart Glass app. That app seems to need to be running on an Oppo smartphone, so you’ll have to pick one of those up as well.

Oppo plans to sell the Air Glass in a “limited release” in China, with a Q1 2022 timescale. The price is unknown at this time, as are any plans to bring it to a worldwide audience.

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