Oppo announces AR Glass 2021

Last year at its Inno Day event, Oppo unveiled AR glasses, and this year it's back with a much improved version. While the previous iteration seemed to model VR glasses in design, this time around, with the Oppo AR Glass 2021, we're getting something that's much closer to a casual pair of eyewear. Not quite there yet entirely, but definitely closer.

Oppo says the AR Glass 2021 is 75% lighter than its predecessor, while connecting it to a Find X2 Pro smartphone through a USB-C to USB-C cable results in a big boost in performance thanks to the Snapdragon 865 chipset.

The Birdbath optical solution used increases contrast by 53%, brightness uniformity by 98%, and pixels per degree by 40% compared to the model showcased in 2019. There's a 0.71-inch OLED display built-in, which has its light refracted by a spectroscope to the eye. The AR Glass 2021 also has a customized large amplitude speaker and a unique semi-open rear cavity acoustic design. All of this means you get a home theater like experience that's akin to watching a 90-inch screen from 3m away.

When paired with a smartphone, you can interact with the glasses by using your handset as a touchpad. You can also track your hands and fingers through the glasses' set of binocular fisheye cams, which can recognize 21 markers on a single hand, four on one finger. Those cameras paired with a ToF camera enable centimeter-level accuracy within 1-degree.

Use cases for the glasses include AR streaming of online and local HD videos, through a "theater-like" viewing experience, AR gaming with the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena and tower defense games, virtual placement of furniture in your home, and AR picture taking with RGB cams that capture virtual and real scenes simultaneously.

The Oppo AR developer program is coming next year, with Oppo providing a comprehensive client-side SDK and a development tool chain, to help the community create AR-specific apps.