Oppo has just announced a new product coming to the Chinese market in Q1 2022 called Air Glass, which could be a spiritual successor to Google Glass.
Oppo defines the Air Glass as an “assisted Reality” device. It’s a heads-up display that attaches to the frame of a pair of glasses and uses a projector to beam an image into a waveguide at the corner of the user’s vision.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 4100-powered system can provide notifications, display weather and calendar info, offer navigation instructions and even function as a teleprompter. The device will also support live, two-way translation between Mandarin Chinese and English or Japanese, showing the translation on the display. Korean translation is also planned.
Users will be able to interact with the Air Glass using head gestures, spoken commands, touch, and hand motion enabled by a paired Oppo Watch 2.
The Spark Micro Projector on the Air Glass was designed by Oppo to take up just a half a cubic center of space while using a Micro LED light source the company claims can reach a brightness of 3 million nits. The projector beams onto a custom-built optical diffraction waveguide, which Oppo says can offer 16-level or 256-level grayscale and provide an average 1,400 nits of brightness, more than enough for day-time visibility.
Oppo has designed the Air Glass to attach to half-frames or full-frames for users who require corrective lenses. It will come in two sizes and colors.
Though the Oppo Air Glass may leap ahead of Google Glass in terms of design, particularly with the use of a thin waveguide instead of a blocky prism, it doesn’t appear to be a monumental leap in capabilities. Like Google Glass, it is offering a simple visual overlay to provide information at a glance. Whereas Google Glass could display color, the Oppo Air Glass appears limited to shades of green. Google Glass also featured an onboard camera — something that raised its fair share of privacy concerns — which Oppo has omitted on its device.
Where Google’s focus has shifted to enterprise for Google Glass, Oppo’s inclusion of walking and bike navigation suggests a broader market for the device. There’s no word on pricing just yet, though, nor on a release beyond the Chinese mainland market. Oppo has indicated a Q1 release date, though maybe take that with a grain of salt, given that Oppo has made similar announcements for the past two years.
