Xiaomi's new AR glasses have retina-level display and gesture control

Xiaomi's new AR glasses have retina-level display and gesture control

Xiaomi just announced its Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition at MWC 2023.

The Chinese company touts its AR glasses as amongst the first to have a "retina-level" display with a PPD of 58. The Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition has a free-form optical module with two microOLED screens that can hit up to 1,200 nits in brightness, and electrochromic lenses which can adapt to different lighting conditions. The AR glasses can enter into a blackout mode for an immersive experience when viewing content, and a transparent mode for a more vivid experience that combines reality and virtual elements.

The Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition supports an innovative micro gesture interaction where the the joints of the user's inner fingers are utilised as a gesture recognition area. This enables the AR glasses to form a four-way directional key for basic movement operations. The 12 knuckles function, which is similar to the Chinese nine-key input method, allows text input via thumb tapping in the finger area. To enter and exit apps, the user slides his/her thumb on the index finger.

Built on Qualcomm's Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 platform, the Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition offers a wireless latency of as low as 3ms1 between the paired smartphone to the glasses, and a wireless connection with full link latency as low as 50ms2.

Thanks to a self-developed silicon-oxygen anode battery, magnesium-lithium alloy and carbon fibre parts, Xiaomi is able to keep its AR glasses relatively light at 126g.

The Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition is compatible with the Xiaomi 13 or other Snapdragon Spaces ready device. The AR glasses also support OpenXR and Microsoft's MRTK development framework. As it is a prototype, Xiaomi did not provide any information on an eventual launch, price or availability.

Source: Xiaomi