I have tried Oppo’s commitment to augmented reality, but Apple can turn all its advances upside down

Among the laboratories that I have been able to visit at Oppo headquarters in Shenzhen, Chinathere is a department that carries out tests on what will be its augmented reality viewer, the Oppo MR Glass.

For now there is no release date for this mixed reality viewer, but what we know is that Oppo has already created a program for developers in China where those interested will be able to receive a kit that allows them to create applications or adapt the ones they already have to other viewers.

Oppo MR Glass is a viewfinder mixed reality which uses several cameras to capture what is around it and two screens where the digital elements are inserted. In addition, it has two controls with buttons and joysticks. In essence, Oppo has a powerful competitor against the Meta Quest 3.

It was quite interesting to find a test bench in the laboratory where they use, once again, a robotic arm. The idea is that the thousands of hours of testing can be automated and made faster than a product with so many cameras and that must perfectly recognize its surroundings.

Yi Xu, director of Extended Reality Technology at Oppo, comments that the use of robotic arms is imitate the thousands of positions a head can achieve when it is “wearing” this visor.

Helped by images that look like huge QR codes, which are not, but allow us to identify the position in which the viewer is at that moment, the cameras are calibrated. They not only tell you the degrees of inclination, but also the distance and, more importantly, whether the cameras are focusing correctly on each movement.

This headset is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ processor., SuperVooc fast charging technology and two 120 Hz refresh screens to ensure that the image you are seeing is as real as possible. It is independent, it does not need a battery or external processing unit, which makes it equal to the Meta solution.

So much potential for so little processing power, its future is in the cloud

In the open demo that I have been able to try in the Oppo laboratories is one of the simplest and that we have seen in similar products for years, an application for painting in augmented reality where the controls in your hands are your brushes.

You can move through the space around the work and modify it, complete it or simply contemplate it. It’s a demonstration of augmented reality technology that we’ve seen for more than half a decade.

Oppo has the technology to reinvent augmented reality indoors and it can be very useful

One of the big problems with augmented reality viewers, like this Oppo MR Glass, is the incredible amount of computing power they require. Current chips go as far as they go, that’s why For Xu, his future lies in the cloud.

Only with the cloud processor could you achieve quality as expected from products like these. If these viewers can stop consuming so much energy and require such powerful processors, they could reach a larger mass of users and stop being so expensive and achieve more uses.

Apple has taken the spotlight off of all augmented reality viewers and Oppo knows it

I have little doubt that Oppo MR Glass, like many products developed in global companies in China, may not reach the West. In this case it is not because there is no available market, but because it has arrived at the worst possible time.

This year, Apple presented its Apple Vision Pro, an augmented reality viewer that, although it shares the same idea of ​​operation, offering an intermediate point between the real world and the digital world, has managed to captivate the attention of this world.

Although its price, some $3,500 makes it a luxury product, Apple has solved several problems that even Xu reports to Apple’s engineering team. Especially since the apple company’s viewer works without having to use controls in the hands, it has cameras that identify the hands and each phalanx.

It remains to be seen how the market for augmented or mixed reality viewers evolves. Meta is the leader in this business and has competitors, but we already know that when Apple enters a new business, it tends to revolutionize it. How quick will Oppo be to refocus its efforts with such competition? And Meta?