“Normal-looking glasses” are the holy grail of augmented reality. Leading tech companies like Google and Intel have teamed up with startups like North and social media giants like Snap to try to design something that people can wear on their eyes without feeling like a total stranger and, what’s more important, uncomfortable to the people around them. No one has discovered this code after nearly a decade of concerted efforts, but Chinese phone maker Oppo is having fun at least with the challenge.
Earlier this year, Oppo launched Air Glass, a headphone-based display screen for the company’s smartphones. Oppo has no plans to launch the Air Glass outside of China and only sells it in “limited quantities” there, where Oppo already plans to replace it with a next-generation version. It’s quite expensive at 4,999 yuan (around $ 745) and, like almost all consumer-oriented AR devices, it’s still more of a demonstration than a product.
But while many RA experiments focus on boosting pure technical capability, Air Glass accepts clear hardware limits to play with an interesting form factor. After getting a set of glasses and a compatible phone to try, I found a design idea so obvious that I’m surprised I haven’t seen it more often, executed with a roughness that makes it clear how much work is left.
The Oppo waveguide projects any LED color you want, as long as it’s green. Photo by Adi Robertson / The Verge
RA is a spectrum and Air Glass falls next to the “simple notification machine,” not the realistic holograms you’ll find in products like Microsoft HoloLens. The device is a unique lens equipped with a monochrome Micro LED projector and a waveguide that projects its light, as well as a plastic stem with a small speaker and a trackpad that accepts slides, touches and presses.
But instead of being permanently integrated into a pair of glasses, Air Glass offers a two-piece design. The system described above has a shallow magnetic point that resembles an Apple MagSafe port halfway along the stem. To use it, put on a pair of custom-designed metal eyeglass frames that have a matching magnetic tip on the temple. The frames are normal glasses, but they fit the lens system on the right side and you have a monocular AR screen similar to Google Glass. When you have finished using the AR component, use this magnetic stitch to fit it against a curved charging case that looks a bit like a shoe horn, which in turn is charged via USB-C.
When you pair Air Glass for Bluetooth with an Oppo phone (again, for China only), you’ll get a green header screen that covers a small but significant part of your vision, for me, about the size of the my palm. one foot away 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, reasonably visible to anything but bright sunlight, and avoids feeling like a washed phone screen. some full color AR screens yes. I kept the watch screen lit continuously for almost three hours without running out of battery, and the charging box was supposed to keep charging closer to 10 o’clock, even though I never managed to charge myself. completely and then exhaust it at once.
I love the theory behind Oppo’s design because it’s a strong tactic to offer many style options while mitigating the perennial AR creep 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 uncomfortable at best and, at worst, presumably invasive; remember those glassless bars in San Francisco? Putting them on meant that he was not only a person who owned an electronic device but a Google Glass carrier, to use the more polite version of the term. Companies like North have built more subtle glasses since then, but they still rely on the idea of having electronics on their face full time.
The lens removes the frames like a MagSafe charger. A metal dot on the frames holds the lens in place.
Air Glass, on the other hand, looks more like a headset for your eyes. Low-tech magnetic tips blend directly with the frames and look like they could easily be added to a variety of styles. The magnetic grip between the 30-gram lens device and the frame is pretty solid, but it’s trivially easy to remove the AR part and attach it to the case even if you’re wearing full-time prescription glasses, making it clear that 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 instead of trying to hide what worries them within a smaller package. It also helps that this generation of Air Glass doesn’t have a camera, though Oppo says it doesn’t rule out the option for future releases.
Oppo’s AR interface focuses on simple widget-like applications in the form of “cards,” which you manage from the complementary smartphone app. “Opening” a card throws it at the glasses and you can swipe between the cards with the side trackpad or turn the screen of the glasses on and off by touching it. You can also long press the glasses to make voice commands or use gestures with an Oppo smartwatch, which I didn’t have.
More basically, the cards display information such as time or time. More complex cards open step-by-step directions with Baidu Maps, display almost real-time language translations, or load text files to create an AR teleprompter. Since the teleprompter only shows the text you want, you can also use it more creatively: I cooked dinner one night by writing the recipe in a Word document and using the glasses as a hands-free screen.
The trackpad switches between cards and toggles the screen.
It’s a good set of functions executed intuitively at a high level, but the average experience is still very hard, and for anyone who doesn’t speak Chinese, it can only be used in half. Step-by-step navigation tools and voice commands have not been implemented in English, so I confused them with the help of Google Translate and my semi-forgotten college language studies. (Within my very limited abilities, both seemed functional but awkward.)
Automatic translation is limited to English and Chinese, and it’s not as perfect as, say, those vaporware glasses that Google asked us for in May. You can press a button to make a person speak on the phone linked to a language and see it translated into the text of the second language on the glasses, then have the wearer of the glasses speak and the results be translated in a similar way to text on the phone. There is also an option for two sets of glasses, but I couldn’t try it.
Using the translation system speaking to myself in both languages, the side of the phone tended to run out of time 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 my native English or my very rusty Mandarin, which is not an exclusive Oppo problem, but is a reminder that real-time translation still has limits on real world.
Also, the fact that Oppo’s non-AR frames are pretty normal (though without glass for me, which made me look like an unbearable hipster wearing them in public) doesn’t make the total package any less ridiculous. The lens design over the lens of the glasses looks unique, mostly because the frame and waveguide have completely different shapes even though Oppo has designed them to work together. From specific angles, the glasses will show in a clear and bright way what is on the screen in the outside world, increasing its retro sci-fi atmosphere. The design is barely 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 eyewear designers building compatible magnetic tips in different frame styles, but it’s unclear if the lens will work just as well on top of various shapes and sizes.
And worse than all that, I had persistent, albeit minor, comfort issues with optics. In my first few hours with the glasses on, I felt slightly dizzy and had a headache the minutes after I put them on. The discomfort seemed to improve over time, but my eyes still feel tense after wearing them.
The charging case is connected via USB-C. It is not clear why the cover does not cover the lens.
I asked Oppo about the problem and spokeswoman Krithika Bollamma pointed out that monocular displays like Air Glass and Google Glass can cause headaches for some buyers. By email, AR optics expert and KGOnTech writer Karl Guttag agreed that the single lens, with a focal length effectively focused on infinity, could be to blame. “You may have a conflict between one eye focused on infinity and the other eye focused on the real world,” Guttag said, suggesting I could confirm this by trying to keep my other eye focused on distance.
This continues with my informal experience, where doing short distance tasks like cooking or looking at a monitor tends to cause illness …