At the OPPO Inno Day 2020 event, the company teased its new AR glasses. Details on the product itself were few and far between, but there was enough shown to interest this observer. Most of the specs given were (unfortunately) in relation to the company's previous generation of AR glasses, which did not receive a commercial launch, so a statistic that the new product has 40% better CPU isn't really useful. No price or launch date were given.

However, we did see some interesting features. Firstly, the product is smartphone-tethered (via a USB cable), which has allowed OPPO to make a lightweight and slim design. External facing binocular fisheye cameras enable the integrated hand tracking and SLAM software. Incidentally, OPPO also talked about SLAM using smartphones (and later the sensors on other devices, such as AR glasses) to create digital twins of the real world on teh OPPO CybeReal platform. This potentially makes the company an interesting competitor to the likes of Google and Facebook in this space, as discussed in our report from earlier this year, Is Facebook's Scape Acquisition a New Vision for Location or a SLAM into AR?

What impressed me is the way the company talked about the AR sector generally. There is an acknowledgement that AR is a new and different type of technology, and that you can't simply take software or content from other platforms and expect to create a good experience. The company also understands that the ecosystem around AR isn't in place yet, and as well announcing as a couple of partnerships (with iQiYi and JD.com), OPPO used the event to announce a new developer program for AR, starting next year. It's good to hear an honest assessment of the challenges and some potential solutions, which makes me more optimistic about OPPO's chances for success, even in a field we anticipate become crowded with launches also expected from Samsung and Apple.

Strategy Analytics AR forecasts, and the overall assessment of the market for AR glasses can be accessed by subsribers, or if you are not currently a subscriber to our Virtual and Augmented Reality research, then a complimentary executive summary of that report can also be downloaded.