Xiaomi has unveiled the Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition, a wireless headset that will allow you to connect to a smartphone to get AR experiences on the move.
The “Discovery Edition” in the title lets you know that this is a concept, designed for development, rather than the final product that will be available to customers.
There are a range of interesting elements in the new AR glasses that are worth paying attention to. These are next-gen AR glasses, designed to be lighter and more capable to do away with the wires. They are build on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 platform and are Snapdragon Spaces-certified, so should work wirelessly with any Snapdragon Spaces-enabled mobile phone.
The glasses use a magnesium-lithium alloy, with carbonfibre elements, to make them strong and light, with a silicon-oxygen anode battery. The weight is just 126g. They come in a titanium colour with three different nosepieces and the option for a myopic clip for near-sighted users.
The lenses on the front are electrochromatic, able to adapt to different lighting conditions. At one end they can black out, ideal for VR functions, through to being transparent, which is what you’ll need for AR to bring together physical and virtual worlds.
Moving onto the hardware and Xiaomi is keen to talk about its MicroOLED screens in the glasses, with brightness level up to 1200 nits, with that brightness key to providing vivid AR experiences. These displays are also really detailed, offering 58 PPD (pixels per degree), which Xiaomi say is key to making the sure there’s no granularity in the image, for the best user experience.
Xiaomi is also offering a new range of gesture interactions. Thanks to hand detection, the glasses can detect finger joints to allow a range of interaction methods using your hands, so you can open apps, swipe through pages, or navigate around the UI.
Xiaomi says that you’ll be able to use apps like TikTok or YouTube on the big screen, you’ll be able to grab content from the TV and move it to the glasses, or you can use gestures to interact with smart devices, for example turning on a lamp by looking at it and kicking a virtual button. These sorts of interactions will leverage Xiaomi’s smart home platform.
As we said, these glasses have really been designed for development of the platform, but we’d be surprised if they didn’t get a full launch – something that’s happened with a number of Discovery Edition devices in the past. To use the glasses, you’ll need to connect to a Snapdragon Spaces smartphone, for example the Xiaomi 13 or OnePlus 11.
