Following the release of Facebook’s Ray-Ban Stories comes another potential competitor in the smart glasses market, Xiaomi. Xiaomi, one of the best-selling smartphone manufacturers in the world, has recently debuted its latest concept device, the Xiaomi Smart Glasses.
The glasses feature a 5mp camera on the hinge and unlike the Ray-Ban Stories, have a waveguide display in front of one of the lenses. Similar to the Snapchat Spectacles released earlier this year, the display sits in front of the user’s eyes to display information, although, in order to miniaturize them from the bulky Snapchat Spectacles, Xiaomi went for a monochrome display.
The display is shown in a green light projected from a micro led measuring only 2.4 mm x 2.02 mm with screen pixels measuring a tiny 4 μm. By focusing on a single green wavelength, Xiaomi claims the display module can output 2 million nits of brightness spread across its waveguide optics. Similar to Google’s initial smart glasses offering, the display is limited to a single eye at a fixed focus.
While Xiaomi’s offering has limited abilities such as only displaying overlays like turn by turn directions and real-time text translation, it’s interesting to see a different approach to building AR glasses of the future. While competitors attempt to fully jump to a full-color display in a portable format, Xiaomi and Facebook are laying the groundwork to build their platforms.
