Nreal, a company that wants to make mixed reality experiences available to everyone, announced it’s Light MR glasses at CES 2019. However, consumers haven’t had an opportunity to experience the tech for themselves until this year.
In August, the tech started shipping in Korea alongside the new Samsung Galaxy Note 20. Unfortunately, we don’t have a date for when they may appear in the UK yet. These glasses aim to offer an alternative to bulky headsets. They use spatial tracking and image projection to overlay apps into the real world. According to Nreal, it’s a more intuitive experience than using a smartphone.
Nreal stands out as one of the few companies still investing in general-purpose smart glasses for the consumer environment after Google acquired the North startup and dropped support for consumer MR glasses soon after.
A New Experience for Media and Gaming
As part of their CES demo, Nreal advertised the Light glasses as a solution for media and gaming. The consumer version of the glasses come with a set of different nose clip sizes for various faces, a corrective lens section (if you wear glasses), and a VR cover which acts as a sort of blackout for a clearer picture. Nreal also claims it’s bringing hand tracking to the glasses at some point.
With these glasses, you can pull up virtual screens to watch videos, and move them around your room. You can essentially overlap the features of your apps into the real world around you, with a picture quality that’s particularly impressive, thanks to a 52-degree field of view, and a 1080p resolution.
The Nreal light glasses connect to smartphones with USB cables, and it promises to support a variety of apps, such as Chrome, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also get glasses with their own Nreal computing unit.
Weighing only around 88g, these glasses look and feel very similar to your standard eyewear. However, they come with SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) features, as well as environmental understanding, image tracking, plane detection, and 6DoF tracking.
The Future of Mixed Reality?
Neither an augmented reality nor virtual reality solution, the Nreal smart glasses are something impressively new. They come with a controller that’s touch sensitive, and haptic feedback, so you can control the apps you want to interact with in your vision. Nreal also offers a development platform where experts can build their own experiences.
Right now, it’s difficult to say for certain how effective these glasses would be in the business world. Currently, we can’t get our hands on a pair in the UK, but from what we’ve seen from reviews around the world, the Light glasses look pretty special. You could easily create immersive shopping experiences with a set of glasses like these or transform the interactions that a customer has with a service team. Plus, there are endless opportunities for more effective collaboration experiences, with files and documents you can add to your physical space with overlays.
We look forward to a day when the Nreal Light glasses are available in the UK.
