Smartglasses

Nreal’s New AR Sunglasses Look Pretty Gosh Darn Stylish

September 30, 2021 From vrscout

The Nreal Air AR smart glasses are capable of simulating a massive 201-inch with a refresh rate of 90Hz.

Hot off the heels of a successfulSeries C funding round, Nreal—the company behind the Nreal Light AR glasses—has announced a new set of consumer AR sunglasses. The Nreal Air are unlike any other AR glasses we’ve seen so far, combining style with technology.

Nreal’s latest AR wearable is centered around convenience and comfort. Weighing in at only 77g, the company claims that the Nreal Air can be worn comfortably all day, whether you’re looking at the latest sales numbers during a work call or enjoying some after-work-hour activities like streaming episodes of your favorite TV show or chasing high scores against your gaming buds.

On top of solo activities, the Nreal Air allows you to create a shared digital space and invite other Nreal Air users from anywhere around the globe. Here you can collaborate with coworkers or watch content with friends in the virtual theater.

Image Credit: Nreal

The Nreal Air is capable of projecting a massive 130-inch hi-res virtual display when viewing the screen at a simulated distance of 3 meters. The glasses promise impressive visuals powered by its best-in-market micro-OLED chip. If you are looking through Nreal Air at a virtual distance of 6 meters, however, you’ll end up with a whopping 201-inch screen featuring an impressive refresh rate of 90Hz.

While the glasses require a tethered smartphone in order to run, Nreal took additional steps to prevent the device from quickly draining your phone’s battery. What’s especially interesting is the fact that the Nreal Air supports both iPhones and iPads, making them one of the first AR devices in the world to offer compatibility with Apple iOS. Don’t worry Android users, the Nreal Air will be compatible with most Android devices.

There’s no shortage of innovation when it comes to the Nreal Air. Nreal built the glasses to be more adaptive to various facial structures thanks to an Adjustable 3-Step Rake System built into the frames. This system allows for more customization by giving you the ability to tilt the lens to adjust the viewing angle in your glasses. It also uses elastic temples that fit snuggly on your head to prevent the glasses from slipping off of your face.

From the looks of the images we’ve seen, the Nreal Air sunglasses look deceptively stylish. Like other smart glasses such as Snapchat Spectacles or Ray Ban Stories, the glasses controls are built into the arms of the glasses. Nreal took privacy seriously when designing the Nreal Air AR sunglasses. The company streamlined the outward-facing camera to focus more on the theater experience, making the lenses spectacularly occlusive.

In an official press release, Chi Xu, Founder of Nreal, said, “Consumers today are seeking lighter, but longer-lasting AR glasses exclusively for streaming media and working from home. For instance, in Korea, we’ve found that 78% of our users use Nreal Light to watch streaming content.” Xu adds, “Nreal Air builds on our Nreal Light offering and furthers our mission to spread AR globally. With Nreal Air, we’ve zeroed in on the perks of a portable movie theater and condensed this into lightweight AR sunglasses with a zero-footprint display, while making it affordable.”

We’ve yet to get our hands on a pair of Nreal Air glasses, but when we do, we’ll be sure to provide more in-depth coverage.

Nreal plans on launching their Nreal Air AR sunglasses in December 2021 in three key Asian markets, including Japan, China, and South Korea in partnership with the world’s leading carriers. Nreal Air’s rollout to other markets will continue through 2022. Pricing will be determined by local carrier partners but will retail at a fraction of the price of Nreal Light.

To learn more about Nreal, click here.

Feature Image Credit: Nreal

Xiaomi Teases Smart Glasses Concept with MicroLED Display & 5MP Camera

September 14, 2021 From roadtovr

Chinese tech giant Xiaomi unveiled its first pair of smart glasses today, sensibly called Xiaomi Smart Glasses. They aren’t a product you can buy for now, as the company calls the concept device “an engineer’s look into an advanced future.” With the world’s largest smartphone manufacture expressing interest though, it may mean we’ll be hearing a lot more about consumer smart glasses in the years to come.

Hot on the heels of Facebook & Ray-Ban’s Stories camera glasses, Xiaomi released a video showing off its own concept smart eyewear which not only includes a 5MP camera and speakers, but also a microLED display that serves up information such as notifications, turn-by-turn directions, and real-time text and photo translations.

Based around a quad-core ARM processor running Android, Xiaomi Smart Glasses are said to contain a microLED on silicon chip measuring 2.4mm × 2.02mm, something the company says is roughly the size of a grain of rice, with individual pixels sized at 4μm.

For a concept that may or may not be built, Xiaomi doesn’t boast specs like a full RGB display, rather showing one in green monochrome that’s supposed to optimize for brightness—2 million nits, Xiaomi says—serving info to the user’s right eye via waveguide optics.

Xiaomi Smart Glasses house a single 5MP camera for taking photos and doing machine learning tasks like translating text between languages. Like Ray-Ban Stories, an adjacent indicator light is included so others know when its in-use. The whole package is said to weigh in at only 51g, which is about the weight of two alkaline AA batteries.

The company is positioning it as a standalone device that won’t act as a “second screen” for your smartphone. That’s a bit of a stretch for now though since it only has a few functions, such as displaying basic notifications, incoming calls, turn-by-turn navigation, taking photos, and serving up what it claims is “real-time text and photo translations.”

Optical wearables such as smart glasses and AR headsets (learn about the difference here) are still in such an early state that input is far from solved. Xiaomi says its primary input will be handled by XiaoAi AI voice assistant, which can do things like audio-to-text transcription. It’s also said to contain a touchpad, which is ostensibly integrated into one of the glasses’ arms.

It’s uncertain if Xiaomi Smart Glasses are simply a “what if” at this point, or if it’s truly looking to productize the fledgling wearable in the near future. Xiaomi generally seems at home making smaller design risks to better differentiate itself from Samsung and Apple, with things like retracting selfie cameras and edge-to-edge displays making headlines. That said, if Xiaomi is gearing up to enter a market, you can bet they’ll bring their patent one-upmanship to the table in any class of smart device they produce.

Facebook & Ray-Ban Launch $300 Stories Glasses, a Hybrid Between Snap Spectacles & Bose Frames

September 9, 2021 From roadtovr

Facebook and Ray-Ban today unveiled Stories, a new line of tech-forward glasses the companies hope will pave the way for a future of smart and stylish AR devices. Stories appear to fit in the same category as the first three generations of Snap’s Spectacles, but also include integrated audio like Bose Frames, making them a little less smart than we had initially hoped—but a lot smarter than most.

Stories are being offered in three distinct flavors: Wayfarer, Round, and Meteor, all of which appear to be pretty similar to original Ray-Ban frame designs. They’re launching today at $300 direct from Ray-Ban as well as official online retailers in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Italy and Australia.

Stories look pretty sleek, which is partly because they don’t have any form of display within, as they feature the sort of lenses you might find in any normal pair of sunglasses or prescription specs. Instead, Stories includes dual 5 megapixel cameras on the temples that let you capture sterescopic video and still images. A single button on the right temple is used to start and stop 30-second video recordings, and take photos.

Facebook is advertising a storage of about thirty 30-second videos or 500 photos, which is said to be kept locally encrypted on the device itself. That’s the only storage metric available to us, so there’s no word on how large that space physically is in GBs.

The frames also house microphones and integrated speakers that stream audio over Bluetooth 5.0, which will let you listen to music or podcasts, and take calls in addition to voice recognition stuff like saying “Hey Facebook, take a video.”

That Facebook Assistant integration and the Facebook View app come part an parcel with Stories, the latter of which acts as your content management platform where you can import, edit, create and share captures.

Check out Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reveal Stories in the video below:

As for privacy, a capture LED on the right temple indicates when Stories are recording, and they also feature a physical off button as well on the glasses’ left strut.

Models are offered in both sunglasses versions with a variety of colors or clear lenses featuring clear with blue light filter, brown gradient, green, grey, blue polarized, and transition lenses.

A magnetic charging case also ships with Stories, although the battery situation is far from clear, both in terms of on-device runtime and added runtime with the case.

Here’s a few basic specs:

Photo stills: 2,592 x 1,944px
Video camera: Minimum 1,184 x 1,184px@30fps
Dual micro speakers
3 Microphone Audio Array
WIFI 802.11 Ac, 2.45/5 Ghz
Bluetooth 5.0
OS Compatibility – IOS 13 / Android 8.1 Minimum

Facebook seems to be playing a little fast and loose by specifically calling Stories “smart glasses.” To be fair, Stories are basically a new product segment that aim to bridge the gap between camera glasses like earlier iterations of Snap Spectacles and audio sunglasses like Bose Frames. Smarter glasses, maybe?

Unlike augmented reality, which shows the user digital information that’s presented as if exists in reality itself (think Microsoft HoloLens, Nreal Light, Magic Leap 1), smartglasses typically present actionable information to the user via a small screen that functions as a heads-up display (HUD). Much like a smartwatch, smartglasses are supposed to provide info like text messages, biometrics, incoming phone calls, or turn-by-turn directions. Examples of smartglasses include Google Glass, North Focals, and a number of devices available from Vuzix.

If you want to learn more about smartglasses and AR, check out our primer that tackles that very issue.

This is only the first of what Facebook calls a “multi-year partnership” with Ray-Ban parent company EssilorLuxottica, so it’s likely this is only the first of what will become an evolving product segment towards smarter devices than this.

Facebook’s Ray-Ban Smartglasses Get Their Big Reveal on Thursday

September 8, 2021 From roadtovr

Facebook and Ray-Ban are collaborating on what promises to be a pair of smartglasses, something that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in July would “let you do some pretty neat things.” Well, the companies are getting ready to reveal the device on September 9th, 2021, so we’re sure to learn more then.

Ray-Ban, a brand of the mega Italian-French optics firm EssilorLuxottica, released a splash page showing off the silhouette of a very Wayfarer-looking pair of specs. Although we’ve heard about the deal for two years now, little is known about the upcoming ‘smart glasses’—their words, not ours—they at very least have the ability record high-quality video.

Facebook Reality Labs VP Andrew Bosworth tweeted a video earlier this week showing off some of his family vacation, which notably features a cameo by none other than Mark Zuckerberg. It’s thought these were recorded with the Ray-Ban/Facebook specs.

😎 pic.twitter.com/Vun7vmuCbU

— Boz (@boztank) September 6, 2021

Bosworth also tweeted another video emphasizing the device’s ability to be capture video whilst leaving the user free to golf two-handed. In both videos we can see Zuckerberg and April Bosworth donning what appear to be Ray-Bans, although it’s unclear if either these are the ‘smart’ variety or otherwise.

🏌️😎 pic.twitter.com/ul748jBS2Y

— Boz (@boztank) September 7, 2021

Smartglasses are a wearable device separate from augmented reality, and are generally defined by their ability to present useful information to the user, often in the form of a small floating screen or heads-up display (HUD). Like a smartwatch, information ranges from things like text messages, biometrics, incoming phone calls, turn-by-turn directions, etc. Think Google Glass or Vuzix Blade—not Microsoft HoloLens or Magic Leap 1.

In Facebook’s Q2 2021 earnings call in late July, Zuckerberg said he was excited release the glasses whilst continuing to “make progress on the journey towards full augmented reality glasses in the future.” We’re hoping to learn what precisely separates the Ray-Ban specs from camera glasses like Snap’s Spectacles (gen 1-3), which only record brief snippets of video.

If you’re interested in learning what separates smartglasses and augmented reality, read more here. We’ll be following this story as it breaks tomorrow, so check back for more then.