The wearable electronics category has been dominated by smartwatches and earbuds in recent years. But companies keep trying to make smart glasses a thing, and Oppo’s entry in the space actually looks… not bad.
Oppo Air Glass looks like a normal set of eyeglasses when you’re not using it for anything fancy. But you can snap a monocle onto the side and it can project text and images in your field of view, essentially turning your glasses into a head-up display that you can use for navigation, real-time translations, or viewing notifications without looking at your phone or computer.
Basically Oppo Air Glass sounds like Google Glass… but you can simply remove the electric portion when you’re not using it. The monocle is held in place by a magnet, so
The system is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 4100 processor and features a micro LED projector that can display monochrome text and graphics at a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, up to 1400 nits of average brightness, and either 16 or 256 levels of grayscale.
There a touch-sensitive controls on the side of the device and users can also control Air Glass with voice commands or hand tracking. It also pairs with a smartphone app (compatible with Oppo phones running ColorOS 11 or later) for controls and configuration.
Weighing just about an ounce, there’s not much room for a large battery, but Oppo says the Air Glass should be able to run for up to 3 hours during active usage and it support sup to 40 hours of standby time.
Oppo plans to offer Air Glass to customers in China in early 2022 as part of a “limited release.” There’s no word on how much it will cost or if Oppo Air Glass will target mainstream consumers or just business customers.
Smart Glasses are definitely something that I want, but the privacy-invasive direction that technology services have taken these days forces me to have second thoughts.
I could only agree to buy something like this if it (and its smartphone app) were open source, and deliberately designed to keep my data contained locally. It would have to be a device that is rather “dumb” in nature. Like a simple widget-based UI for things like weather, navigation directions, etc.