Xiaomi's new Wireless AR Smart Glasses
The Xiaomi Wireless AR Smart Glass in transparent mode (left) and Electrochromic mode (right).
"The Xiaomi Wireless AR Smart Glass Explorer Edition glasses feature a pair of Micro-OLED screens — one for each eye — that pump out full HD visuals at 1,200 nits of brightness. There are three forward-facing cameras on the front of the glasses that are used to map the environment immediately in front of the wearer. The glasses are lightweight at 126g. Xiaomi says it managed to keep the weight low by using lightweight materials like carbon fiber, magnesium alloy, and a self-developed silicon-oxygen anode battery that's smaller than a typical lithium-ion battery.
The glasses run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 chip. It has no on board storage, so it must be connected to a host device such as your smart phone. The glasses are entirely wireless. It connects to a smartphone via the company's "proprietary low-latency communication link" (an engineer tells me it's a combination of WiFi and Bluetooth), and Xiaomi advertises a latency of just 50ms, which is fast enough that you can't quite perceive noticeable lag.
During the demo Xiaomi reps showed off three AR tests. The first was running an interactive virtual desktop where I could open multiple windows and have them "map" onto the real world environment in front of me. I could control the windows — move it around, or resize it — via using the connected phone screen as a trackpad, or I could stick out my arm and use hand gestures to physically move the windows. When I stuck my arm out with palms facing outward, a laser beam projects from my palm, which I can use as a pointer. I can use a finger pinch motion to "grab" a window and move it around. The second demo was an AR shooting game, in which I could plant a virtual machine gun station on a flat surface (for my demo, I used a table), and I had to shoot these weird-looking animals walking towards me. I could control aiming with the phone or my hands. Finally, the third demo had me jumping into a virtual Xiaomi Home UI where I could use my hand and finger to flick a virtual switch to turn on/off a real life Xiaomi lamp that was on sight during the demo.
Everything works as advertised from the visual floating in front of my face, to the sensors picking up my hand/arm gestures. Even if the AR applications are limited, I would want to own a pair right now just for the ability to watch movies or scroll through Instagram and TikTok on a wearable display not tethered by a cable. It's just a prototype due to the battery life and cost. It lasted 30 min before running out of juice.
The Xiaomi Wireless AR Smart Glass features an electrochromic lenses that can turn black with the press of a button. The idea is that, when you're wearing the glasses for AR content, you want the lenses to be transparent, so you can see the real world. But when you're watching a movie, you may want to have the content play over a black screen for more immersion. Existing AR glasses from nReal or TCL all have a physical lens cover that you snap onto the glasses. Xiaomi's doesn't need a physical cover. It's not possible for me to show exactly how the AR visuals looked to my eyes in photos, so the best I could do was stick a phone behind the glasses to capture a portion of what my eyes would see. I can say that Xiaomi's marketing slides and promo videos are a fair representation of what I saw."
Xiaomi's AR Smart Glasses are a prototype not meant for commercial release right now, but the hardware feels more than ready
www.xda-developers.com
