While the development of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality has seen some setbacks with Google’s Google Glass, Microsoft’s HoloLens, and Meta’s metaverse, Xiaomi has quietly perfected its technology, allowing them to launch its innovative glasses.
The Xiaomi Wireless AR Smart Glass Discovery Edition offers an “adaptive display at the retina level that adjusts to the lighting environment,” along with improved connectivity to smartphones that feature Snapdragon Spaces technology. The glasses also feature “high-speed interconnect buses developed by Xiaomi to achieve high-speed data connection from the smartphone to AR glasses.”
Powered by a Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 chip, the glasses have very little latency despite their wireless connection, according to Xiaomi. They offer a wireless latency of only 3ms between the smartphone and glasses, and a full link wireless latency of only 50ms, comparable to wired solutions.
The glasses’ ambition is to “perceive virtual objects as clearly as physical objects.” Xiaomi claims to have achieved a first in the industry with their system that displays the image “at the retina level,” with an angular resolution close to 60, reducing the visibility of pixel grids to almost zero. The micro OLED screens and light guides provide a bright and detailed image in front of the user’s eyes, without making the glasses too complicated, heavy, or bulky (they weigh only 126g!).
What sets these glasses apart is the opaque external surface with the “occluding” mode, which can become transparent with the push of a button. The technology is reminiscent of electrochromic glass that can instantly darken windows, increasingly used in offices and professional spaces. With the transparent mode, the AR experience is “more vivid and blends reality and virtual elements.”
