“Normal-looking glasses” are the holy grail of augmented reality. Big tech companies like Google and Intel have joined startups like North and social media giants like Snap in trying to design something people can wear on their eyes without feeling like complete weirdos and, more importantly , without making the people around them feel uncomfortable. No one has cracked that code after nearly a decade of concerted effort, but Chinese phone maker Oppo is at least having fun with the challenge.
Earlier this year, Oppo launched Air Glass, a glasses-based heads-up display for the company’s smartphones. Oppo has no plans to release the Air Glass outside of China, and it’s only being sold in “limited quantities” there, where Oppo already plans to replace it with a next-gen version. It’s quite expensive at 4,999 yuan (about $745), and like almost all consumer-oriented AR devices, it’s still more of a demo than a product.
But while many AR experiments focus on pushing pure technical possibilities, Air Glass accepts some clear hardware limitations to play with an interesting form factor. After receiving a set of glasses and a compatible phone to try out, I found a design idea so obvious I’m surprised I haven’t seen it more often, filled with a rawness that shows how much work remains.
Oppo’s waveguide projects any LED color you want, as long as it’s green. Photo by Addy Robertson/The Verge
AR is a spectrum, and Air Glass is on the “simple notification machine” side, not the realistic holograms you’ll find in products like Microsoft HoloLens. The device has a single lens equipped with a monochrome Micro LED projector and waveguide that projects its light, plus a plastic handle with a small speaker and a trackpad that accepts swipes, taps and presses.
But instead of being permanently built into a pair of glasses, Air Glass offers a two-piece design. The system described above has a shallow magnetic opening that somewhat resembles an Apple MagSafe port in the middle of the stem. To use it, you put on a pair of specially designed metal eyeglass frames that have a matching magnetic protrusion on the temple. The frames are regular glasses, but they fit the lens system on the right side and you have a monocular AR display similar to Google Glass. When you’re done using the AR component, you use this magnetic carousel to attach it to a curved charging case that looks a bit like a shoehorn, which in turn charges via USB-C.
When you pair the Air Glass via Bluetooth with a (again China-only) Oppo phone, you’ll get a green heads-up display that covers a small but significant portion of your vision—for me, roughly the size of my palm held a foot from my right eye The virtual overlay looks like something a cyborg killer would use in the dystopian future of 1995, but in a mostly good way: it’s high-contrast, relatively visible in all but bright sunlight, and avoids feeling like washed out phone screen the way some full color AR displays do. I kept the watch’s display on continuously for nearly three hours without the battery draining, and the charging case should hold a charge for close to 10 hours, though I never managed to fully charge it and then drain it all at once.
I like the theory behind Oppo’s design because it’s a strong tactic to offer a lot of styling options while mitigating the ever-present AR creepiness factor. Nine years ago, Google Glass put an expensive camera and projection system in front of the user’s eyes at all times, something that felt awkward at best and accidentally invasive at worst—remember those glassless bars in San Francisco? Putting them on made you not just a person who owns an electronic device, but also a Google Glass wearer, to use the more polite version of the term. Companies like North have created more subtle glasses since then, but they’re still based on the idea of having electronics on your face full-time.
The lens detaches from the frame like a MagSafe charger. A metal protrusion on the frames holds the lens in place.
In contrast, Air Glass is more like a headset for your eyes. The low-tech magnetic studs fit right into the frames and look like they could easily be added to a variety of styles. The magnetic attachment between the 30g lens and frame is pretty solid, but it’s trivially easy to remove the AR part and stick it in the case, even if you wear prescription glasses full-time, making it clear you don’t have a secret screen stuck to your face . It’s a solution that takes people’s concerns about privacy and distraction seriously, rather than just trying to hide the things they worry about in a smaller package. It also helps that this generation of Air Glass doesn’t have a camera, though Oppo says it’s not ruling out the option for future versions.
Oppo’s AR interface focuses on simple gadget-like applications in the form of “cards” that you control from the companion smartphone app. “Opening” a map launches it in the glasses, and you can slide between maps with the side trackpad or toggle the glasses’ display on and off by touching it. You can also long press the glasses for voice commands or use gestures with an Oppo smartwatch, which I didn’t have.
In general, maps show information such as the time or weather. More sophisticated maps open up turn-by-turn directions for pedestrians using Baidu Maps, display near-real-time language translation, or load text files to create an AR teleprompter. Since the teleprompter basically just displays any text you want, you can also use it more creatively – one night I made dinner by writing the recipe in a Word document and using the glasses as a hands-free screen.
The trackpad switches between maps and switches the display.
It’s a good set of features, performed intuitively at a high level, but the average experience is still very rough – and for anyone who doesn’t speak Chinese, only half-usable. The turn-by-turn navigation tools and voice commands aren’t input in English, so I messed around with them using Google Translate and my half-forgotten college language studies. (Within my very limited capabilities, both seemed functional but clunky.)
Automatic translation is limited to English and Chinese, and isn’t as seamless as, say, those steam goggles Google asked us to imagine back in May. You can press a button to have one person speak into the paired phone in one language and see it translated to the text on the glasses in the second language, then have the wearer of the glasses speak and get the results similarly translated into text on the phone. There is also an option for two sets of cups, but I didn’t get to try it.
Using the translation system, speaking to each other in both languages, the phone side tended to time out or not recognize that I had spoken after pressing the button. It took a few seconds to transcribe and then translate even short messages from either my native English or my very rusty Mandarin – which isn’t a problem unique to the Oppo, but a reminder that real-time translation still has limitations in the real world.
Also, the fact that Oppo’s non-AR frames are perfectly normal (albeit without glass for me, which made me look like an insufferable hipster wearing them in public) doesn’t make the whole package any less ridiculous looking. The lens-on-lens design of the glasses looks uniquely silly, especially because the frame and waveguide are completely different shapes, even though Oppo designed them to work together. From specific angles, the glasses will show whatever’s on your screen clear and bright to the outside world, enhancing their retro-sci-fi feel. The design is a bit heavier than wearing a pair of large sunglasses, but it leans to one side – not enough to bother me as a user, but enough to be noticeable from the outside. It’s intuitive to imagine that eyeglass designers would build compatible magnetic lugs onto different frame styles, but it’s not clear that the lenses would perform equally well on different shapes and sizes.
And worst of all, I had consistent, albeit minor, comfort issues with the optics. During the first few hours with the glasses, I had slight motion sickness and a headache minutes after putting them on. The discomfort seems to have improved over time, but my eyes still feel strained after wearing them.
The charging case plugs in via USB-C. It is not clear why the case does not cover the lens.
I asked Oppo about the issue, and spokesperson Krithika Bollamma noted that monocular displays like Air Glass and Google Glass can cause headaches for some buyers. Over email, AR optics expert and KGOnTech writer Carl Gutag agreed that the single lens — with a focal length effectively focused at infinity — could be the culprit. “It’s possible to get a conflict between one eye focused at infinity and the other eye focused on the real world,” Gutag said, suggesting I could confirm it by trying to keep my other eye focused on the distance.
This is consistent with my anecdotal experience where doing close range tasks like cooking or looking at a monitor tends to trigger sickness…
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