China’s Oppo shows a prototype pair of AR glasses with voice assistant
Oppo introduced the Oppo Air Glass 3, an early version of its voice assistant-equipped augmented reality (AR) glasses at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.
According to Oppo, the voice assistant on its most recent AR glasses is driven by AndesGPT, the company’s own large language model (LLM).
The Air Glass 3 must be linked to an Oppo smartphone. Touch sensors on the side of the frame allow users to operate the glasses.
The augmented reality (AR) glasses prototype with voice assistant that Oppo revealed on Monday highlights how the industry’s biggest players in electronics are attempting to differentiate their goods by integrating artificial intelligence into them.
The Oppo Air Glass 3 was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona by Oppo, a Chinese company that is among the largest smartphone manufacturers in the world.
They seem like a typical pair of glasses because Oppo wanted to develop a design that could be worn on a daily basis as a complement to a smartphone. Users may see digital material superimposed over the real-world scene in front of them since they are augmented reality glasses. This might be textual data, such a message or a navigational map.
An Oppo smartphone is required to be connected to the Air Glass 3. Touch sensors on the side of the frame allow users to operate the glasses.
According to Oppo, the voice assistant on its most recent AR glasses is driven by AndesGPT, a large language model (LLM) developed by the Chinese tech company. A lot of chatbots, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which have been quite popular in the last six months, are powered by LLMs. These are basically AI models that have been trained on massive amounts of data.
As per an Oppo press statement, the voice assistant is now available only in China. Oppo claims that the chatbot can carry out dialogues and data checks to help consumers with things like trip planning.
With artificial intelligence (AI) gaining a lot of attention this year due to its explosive popularity, electronics manufacturers are highlighting the AI technologies built into their goods. Oppo is just one of the several Chinese IT companies, like Alibaba and Baidu, who have created their own LLM.
In the meanwhile, other non-Chinese smartphone manufacturers are depending on their own AI models to innovate on products and differentiate themselves in a crowded market of comparable gadgets.
Electronics manufacturers have been talking about virtual reality and augmented reality for a while, but their adoption hasn’t taken off as quickly as many had anticipated. Tech companies have used several strategies. This year, Apple released the $3,500 Vision Pro, a large but very sophisticated augmented reality headset. Meta has also pursued the virtual reality sector with its Quest headsets.
However, a lot of businesses think that because they will make it possible for people to wear them in style every day, lightweight glasses are the way of the future. Among them are the Chinese augmented reality startup Xreal, supported by Alibaba, and Oppo, which has been making augmented reality investments for a number of years.
According to a press release from Oppo, glasses are a good hardware carrier for AI because of their inherent qualities, such as speech and visual interactions, to ultimately become the finest companions for smart devices in various situations. The glasses only weigh fifty grammes.
Oppo has not said whether or not it intends to commercialise the glasses since they are still in prototype form. Public sales of Oppo’s prior Air Glass 2 were not permitted.
Oppo, meanwhile, is attempting to showcase its technological expertise in a sector that it thinks has significant future potential. Originally projected to ship only 500,000 AR headsets in 2023, market research company IDC now projects that number to reach 6.8 million by 2027.
