Oppo's Air Glass is now available

Air Glass is an "aR device," where "a" stands for assisted reality, which is different from regular augmented reality According to Oppo, the difference is that Air Glass does not attempt to render objects in the world in front of it, but only projects 2D images onto the lens

The glasses, which were unveiled today as part of Oppo's Inno Day technology exhibition event (you can read an overview here), appear to pick up where the long-dead Google Glass left off

Most accurately described, the "monocular waveguide" is powered by a Snapdragon Wear 4100 (usually found in smartwatches) and uses a coffee bean-sized "Spark Micro Projector" with up to 1,400 nits of brightness and microLED display allows notifications and apps to be displayed right in front of the user's eyes, even in bright environments The entire device weighs only 30 grams (105 oz) and is available in black and silver

Air Glass can be controlled by touch to the housing, voice, head gestures, hand gestures, or using Oppo's cell phone or the wearable's own app

Oppo lists "weather, calendar, health, teleprompter, translation, and navigation" as some of the apps available for Air Glass The translation feature, which translates foreign language speech into text and displays it, currently appears to support only Chinese (Mandarin) and English translations, but more languages are promised in the future

However, these apps are not offered in the singing and dancing colors you might imagine The display will only work with 16 or 256 levels of grayscale Also, Air Glass cannot be worn by itself It is attached to a specific frame designed by Oppo They are either regular black glasses (for those who already need glasses) or silver half-frame glasses

While not as sophisticated as other AR products like the much-anticipated Apple Glass, keeping things simple means Oppo actually has a practical product, even if it's hard to get outside of China Air Glass will be available in Q1 2022 in It will be available for a "limited release" in China

If that still doesn't get you excited, then take a look at some of Oppo's other announcements The MariSilicon X NPU chip in the next Oppo Find X device will be unveiled, and will improve on the already excellent photography capabilities

The last big thing to check out will be the company's first foldable Find N Let's hope the Find N is not a China-only model like the Air Glass, as it will be a very nice addition to the Oppo lineup