Xiaomi's new wireless AR glass could be a game-changer

Xiaomi, the Chinese tech giant, unveiled its concept of wireless AR glass at the MWC 2023, called "Wireless AR Glass Discovery Editon". This is the company's first wireless AR glass with distributed computing and a retina-level adaptive display that adjusts to the lighting environment.

Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition Overview:

Lightweight design

Xiaomi has used lightweight materials such as magnesium-lithium alloy, carbon fiber, and a self-developed silicon-oxygen anode battery to make this glass as light and comfortable as possible. As a result, this thing weighs only 126 grams.

Industry-first retina-level display

Moreover, this is the first AR glass ever with a retina-level display. The PPD (Pixels Per Degree) of the Xiaomi Wireless AR Glasses is 58. For reference, at 60 PPD, the human eye cannot distinguish granularity on the screen. This Micro OLED display also has a peak brightness of 1200 nits. Additionally, this AR glass comes with electrochromic lenses that can adapt to different lighting conditions.

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Powerful performance

To achieve high-speed data connections with smartphones, Xiaomi has integrated its own high-speed interconnection buses into this glass. Powered by the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 Platform and Xiaomi's proprietary low-latency communication link, this AR glass achieves wireless latency as low as 3ms when communicating with a phone. Or 50ms full link latency wireless connection that's comparable to a wired solution. According to Xiaomi, it has analyzed thousands of head-tracking data samples with details such as the center of gravity, leg spacing, angle, nose rest, and other factors to calibrate this AR glass.

Xiaomi Wireless AR glass has a natural gesture control

As the gesture recognition area, Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass uses the joints of the user's inner fingers. The directional is oriented from the second joint of the middle finger to the second joint of the index finger, where the second joint of the index finger represents the upward direction. This, in conjunction with the surrounding areas, forms a four-way directional key for basic movement operations. Overall, the micro gestures on the Xiaomi AR glass enable a user to perform basic tasks like selecting and opening apps, swiping through pages, exiting an app to return to the start page, use sliding and tapping operations—all without using a smartphone for controls. However, users can also use smartphones for controls if they want to. You can check the embedded tweet above to see these gestures in action.

More app support

Moving on, users can stream a bunch of large-screen applications including TikTok and YouTube through Mi Share on this glass. And they also have the ability to position familiar apps anywhere in the viewing space and adjust their interface size using spatial gestures. But the most important thing is that the Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition can only pair with Snapdragon Spaces-ready devices like the Xiaomi 13 series, OnePlus 11, and more. Whereas the software support for this AR glass includes Snapdragon Spaces, OpenXR, and Microsoft MRTK development framework.

Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition Price and Availability

There's no official word on the pricing and availability of this AR glass since this is just a concept device for now. We'll be sure to update this article with more info once Xiaomi discloses them.

• Meanwhile, check our review of Vivo X90 Pro.