RealMax Qian review: wide FOV AR is amazing!
Some days ago, I published on Youtube the video of my unboxing of the Realmax Qian glasses. From that day, many people have started asking me more about this augmented reality device, so I understood it was time for one of my big reviews! Are you ready to discover more about Realmax Qian?
RealMax Qian
RealMax Qian(乾) is the second iteration of the Realmax augmented reality glasses (the first one was the Realmax 100). These augmented reality devices are manufactured by Chinese company Realmax and are characterized by a very wide field of view. While many other AR glasses (like Nreal Light or HoloLens 2) have a Field Of View in the 50° ballpark, RealMax glasses have always had ones above 100°, for a more immersive augmented experience. This makes the RealMax quite unique in this field, considering that the only other headset that is able to offer such a feature is the Project North Star, which anyway is not standalone like this device.
RealMax Qian Video Review
I have prepared a cool video review about the RealMax Qian, talking about how it is in all its aspects, and showing some through-the-lenses footage. Do you want to watch it? It’s easy, you can find it here below! Otherwise, go on for the usual textual review.
Specifications
RealMax Qian features:
- CPU/GPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon 835
- RAM: 4GB
- Storage: 64GB SD Card
- AR Display: Birdbath design with 2K (2560 * 768) display panel
- FOV: 119° diagonal
- Tracking: 6DOF optical flow tracking via two global shutter omnivision cameras
- Additional cameras: RGB camera for localization and computer vision
- Connectivity: Bluetooth, Wifi, USB-C (with OTG support)
- Integrated audio: dual microphones, built-in speakers, 3.5mm external headphone adapter
- Battery: 6000 mAH hot-swappable
- Input: 3DOF Controller or Leap Motion v1 support for hands tracking
- Extra: a magnetic shield to convert glasses to VR ones
Unboxing
The Realmax Qian unboxing experience was good. The box has a nice design and inside you can find an elegant case that lets you carry the device around. Inside it, the headset and all its accessories are packaged in a very ordered manner. The unboxing experience was not one that put me in awe, but it was straightforward. You can see me unboxing the device in this video:
What I really loved is the usefulness of the case: while with most of the other headsets, after you have unpackaged the device, you don’t know how to carry it around and putting them back in the original box may be a nuisance, the Qian already comes with its case that is very practical, it is rigid so it protects the device, and it is very easy to put everything back in. In this, it is very similar to the Nreal Light, and I like a lot the solution that both companies have provided to us.
In the box you can find:
- RealMax 100 AR glasses
- VR convertible shield
- USB-C charger cable
- Charger
- Bluetooth remote
- USB-micro charger for the remote
- Cleaning cloth
In my unboxing video, you may see that I’ve found an additional Leap Motion v1 controller + Leap Motion mount for RealMax + USB-C cable for Leap Motion. This is because the company sent me a special version of the device with already the necessary setup to use it with the Leap Motion Controller to exploit hands input.
Design
While the case has a nice rounded design, the RealMax Qian headset is not that fancy. More than an enterprise elegant solution (like, for instance, Varjo), it seems a headset that aims at getting the job done instead of looking cool. It is probably one of the least beautiful headsets I have worked with. But on the other side, thanks to its reflective lenses, wearing it on your face is incredibly cool, it makes you look as if you were wearing reflective sunglasses, like the ones that policemen wear in movies. So basically it is not cool on a desk, but can make you look cool while you wear it. It is some kind of magic.
Let’s start looking at it from the front, where you can see the reflective lenses, and the panel containing all the circuitry of the device. If we go a bit towards the top, we can see the three cameras in front of the headset: two used for tracking, and one (RGB) for possible computer vision/mixed reality applications. There is also a light sensor and an IR sensor.
The left and right views are very similar and show you the fact that the main processing unit is separated from the battery that is on the rear of the device. The connection between the two happens via a USB cable that goes through the left part of the headset. In the two pictures below, you can also see the two lateral headbands that are part of the overall fitting mechanism of the headset.
As we will see better in the section about Audio, it is possible to see on the two sides also a little cut in the plastic where every one of the two external speakers are located.
Looking it from the back, it is possible to see the big battery, that is hot-swappable thanks to a little trigger that is one of its sides.
The bottom view of the device reveals almost nothing…
…because the most interesting view is from the top. Apart from the overall top view from which it is possible to see the general appearance of the headset and also see its top headband of the fitting mechanism, on the top (or better top-front), you can see the computational unit of the RealMax Qian. Let’s remember that this is a standalone headset, and it doesn’t require any other external unit to work.
On this panel, you can see the vents to keep it cool, plus three buttons that have similar functions to the three system button that every Android device uses. Thanks to these three buttons, it is possible to handle many of the operations with the Qian even without using the controller. Here you can also find a 3.5mm jack to have more privacy while listening to your AR experiences and the USB-C port that can be used to charge the device or to attach it to a PC or a Leap Motion controller.
Looking the headset from the inside, you can see the wide-FOV lenses and the facemask made in sponge.
Visuals
RealMax provides AR thanks to the birdbath design, which basically means that it renders its images on a traditional display and then projects them on a semi-transparent lens that you have in front of your eyes. This is a simpler mechanism than the waveguides employed by Microsoft HoloLens 2 or by Magic Leap, and while it may provide a bit less immersive holograms, it is the only way to provide affordable wide-FOV glasses at the moment.
And the FOV is the first thing that you notice while you wear the headset... or maybe I should say that you DON’T notice. When you wear RealMax, and you see the augmentations all around you, you say: “Wow, this AR is so cool!” and nothing else. Then something triggers in your mind and you say “wait a moment, with all the other headsets, I would notice a window that limits my vision…”. Having a wide FOV is a so natural thing that actually you don’t notice when you have it, you notice it when you haven’t it. I can say without any doubt that the FOV of RealMax, which is beyond 119°, is how every AR headset should be. And after you try it, you can’t go back, because it is SO MUCH immersive, augmented reality really becomes your reality. It is just amazing.
The wide FOV is the point of strength of the Realmax Qian, that anyway, like all other AR solutions on the market, has its share of drawbacks. For instance, the big FOV is especially horizontal, while the vertical one, even if wide, still feels a bit limited. There are some reflection artifacts on the top and bottom side of your view. And having a big FOV with a rendering screen that is only 2K means that the pixel density on the display is not great and the holograms sometimes feel a bit blurred. This is probably one of the biggest problems with the visuals of this device.
When I tried the RealMax in Nanchang in 2019 I felt its holograms were very transparent, but actually, in my tests in the office, I found them bright and colorful, even if a bit transparent. The only problem is when there is too much light in the room (so even an indoor space during a very sunny day): in that case, augmentations are hard to see. But this is a problem common to all AR headsets.
The worst issues of the visuals happen when you move your head during the experience. When you shake your head, all the visuals start blurring and trembling: for instance, all text becomes barely readable. The motion blur is very noticeable, and I don’t know if it is due to a problem in the tracking or in the display technology. If you move the head more slowly, things are better, but in this case, you perceive that there is some visual distortion happening, like when you watch things through slightly curved glass (like a magnifier glass, but in this case it is not so extreme). These distortions are small, subtle… but we know how our brain is smart in perceiving everything that doesn’t feel natural… and so I could feel them. So, while your head is still, everything is good… when you move, you may have a less pleasant experience.
Another drawback, this common to all the other AR headset, is that the augmentations have another focus than the real objects they have nearby, and this can cause eye strain.
All in all, the wide FOV makes you forgive many of the aforementioned issues, also considering that on the market there are no AR headsets with perfect visuals.
Audio
If visuals are cool, audio is so-and-so. RealMax Qian features two external speakers more or less close to where your ears are expected to be. Anyway to keep costs low, the speakers are integrated into the computational unit, so they are not exactly over your ears, and they are featured on the exterior of the headset and not its interior.
The result is that if you use the integrated speakers, the resulting quality of the audio is mediocre. It gets the job done and it is usable, but it is subpar even if compared to other standalone headsets on the market like the Oculus Quest.
Comfort
When I tried the RealMax glasses in Nanchang, I haven’t been impressed by their comfort, and I confirm exactly this sensation. The headset has very limited comfort settings, and you can barely change a little the length of the three head straps (two lateral, one that goes above your head) that compose the fitting mechanism. The straps can be adjusted using some velcro, but the length of the velcro area is limited, so you can only perform little tweakings to it. The result is that however I try to fix it, the overall strap always results being too little for me and so I can never find a good comfort with this device.
Furthermore, the device is all made in plastic, and in my opinion, it has not enough sponges on the parts that touch your nape and your face, and so it feels a bit hard and edgy on the skin. I’m not a big fan of its ergonomics.
What the company has made a good job on is the weight: the glasses weigh 530g and since the battery is on the back of the headset, and the computational unit is on the forehead, the weight is well distributed on the head. I haven’t felt it as front-heavy and wearing it I had no issues at all for what concerns weight and balancement. Another cool thing, I’ve read, is that it can accommodate well people with glasses.
If only they fixed the fitting mechanism and added more comfort pads, this headset could be very good to wear.
Controller and input
The controller of RealMax is the classic 3DOF controller of an XR headset based on the Daydream design: a touchpad and two buttons on top, two volume buttons on the side. There are no triggers on it.
The headset connects to the controller via Bluetooth and most interactions made with the controller happens via raycast: you point something with the controller and then you click on the touchpad to activate it. the problem, like with all 3DOF controllers, is that it requires constant re-calibration.
If you have not the controller, you don’t have to worry: on the headset, there are 3 buttons that you can use for most of the functions: for instance, if you don’t have the controller, in the initial menu you can point at buttons with your head and then use the most external button on the headset to click on them. The central button acts as a back button, while the inner one turns on/off or pauses the device.
Since having a 3DOF controller with a 6DOF headset is weird (HTC and Lenovo know this well), RealMax has decided to add also support for Leap Motion. You can attach a Leap Motion v1 to your device and use both your hands in the AR experiences that support them. Using both your hands with such a wide FOV AR is amazing, and I think that it offers a great natural way to interact with the AR world. The only problem is that the Android runtime for Leap Motion is not as cool as the latest Gemini for Windows, so sometimes the tracking of the hand was lost a bit too often.
I’ve found the controller more practical to interact with UIs/menus and the hands better to deal with more natural experiences (like an exploration game).
Tracking
For the 6DOF tracking of the RealMax Qian, that is performed thanks to two omnivision cameras, I have a good and a bad news.
The good news is that the tracking works, and it seems also quite stable. I mean, if I put a big car on a certain point of my floor, I can move all around it, I can run, I can shake my head fast, and the car will remain there. This is a sign that the tracking technology is good. I tested it in various indoor conditions (daylight, artificial light, etc…) and it has always worked well.
The bad news is that it trembles. When your head is still, everything is ok, but when you move, the holograms wobble noticeably, and they stabilize only after your head is still again. This wobbling effect of the tracking, combined with the blurred visuals due to head movements, make sure that your experience is not much pleasant while you are moving your head fast. This is very different from what happens with HoloLens, where even if you move, you see the holograms always fixed in the position you put them on.
Battery
The battery of the headset is a big one: featuring 6000mAH of charge, it can support 5-hour of use and 100-hour in standby according to the company. I have not an exact count of the time it can be used for, but for sure the charge lasted a lot.
The battery can be removed easily by pressing a little button on the tray that contains it and you can put a new one very fast. This hot-swap mechanism is very important for enterprise uses of the device.
VR mode
One of the coolest features of the RealMax Qian is that you can also use it as a VR headset. The company provides you a magnetic cover that you can put on the lenses to make them fully opaque, offering you virtual reality. I love this feature, also because being the cover magnetic, it is very easy to be put on and off.
The RealMax is the only headset that can offer this thanks to its wide FOV. No one would ever use a VR headset with 50° FOV, but one with 119° is good and on par with other devices on the market. The experience of RealMax with VR of course is not as good as the one you can have with a native VR headset, because this is just an adaptation of an AR device to perform VR, and it suffers from all the visual problems described above. Also, you can really perceive the limited vertical FOV in VR, and the big hole between your nose and the glasses, which is insignificant in AR but annoying in VR because you can see the world below your eyes. But all in all, the VR experience is ok, a great result for an augmented reality headset.
UX & Applications
RealMax Qian is an enterprise headset, and as such, it feels a lot like a devkit. It has no real UI, it features no store and no official applications. When I got it, it just had a rough launcher to execute some demo programs. In these, I was for instance able to catch with my hands some fishes floating in my room, I could see the volumetric video of an actress performing, I could see all the details of a car by KIA, and also have a look at some 360 photos and videos I transferred from my PC. These are all short demos because the glasses are intended to let you develop and run the experience that is useful for your company.
One thing that I noticed from my tests is that sometimes the Snapdragon 835 feels a bit too limited for what the headset has to do: for instance, the Volumetric video demo had not an ideal framerate, and the audio was crackling a bit. Maybe a future RealMax device with a more recent processor (a Snapdragon XR2) could help in solving these issues.
I’ve also found some bugs and compatibility issues here and there, and once I had to use scrcpy to close an Android menu that opened and I couldn’t close it. It’s a device that sometimes requires a bit of technical knowledge to configure. It feels like a devkit also in this sense.
SDK
Realmax has an SDK that is compatible with Unity 2017 and Unity 2019. Anyway, the SDK is not public, and you can get it only by contacting the company. The company representatives can listen to your needs and propose either to teach you how to develop everything using the Unity SDK, or to use one of the already ready-out-of-the-box solutions that the company already has.
One of them is for instance “Venues”, a solution that lets multiple people enjoy together in the same place the same AR experience, while an orchestrator decides what has to happen in that experience for everyone. You just need to provide the graphical assets, and RealMax can create very easily a multi presence AR experience for you and your company.
Price and Availability
RealMax Qian is already available worldwide for a price of around $2300. The price is not oriented at consumers (as you may have guessed) and includes many services that appeal to enterprise customers. You can contact the company to have more info or buy the headset at this e-mail address.
Company support
I want to underline that RealMax is one of the most supportive headset manufacturers I have ever worked with. Nigel Burton, the CEO of Realmax Inc (the Western department of the company) and CTO of RealMax has an enormous passion and is always ready to help and propose ideas. And this is not limited to him: Anne, Kyle, and all the others are very supportive. This is very important to know: if you pick RealMax for your business, you can be sure that the company will be there helping you, and will not just give you the device. Big kudos to them for what they do.
Final considerations
All in all, my experience with the RealMax Qian was good. This device has very strong points, in particular the fact that it is an all-in-one, so it is incredibly portable, and it has an enormous FOV, making you feel how real AR should be. It has also its drawbacks, like the fact that the visuals are a bit blurred, and that when you move your head things tremble a bit, but for the enterprise world it is aimed to, where the only important thing is to make the job done, these issues are not that important. It already allows for locally shared AR experiences, something that is very important both for entertainment (a shared Location-based AR game) and enterprise (to have a meeting around a virtual prototype). It is a very interesting headset, and I think you should consider it for your enterprise XR experiences: the wide FOV it offers enables many experiences that are not possible with the other devices.
It is not perfect, but no AR headset on the market is even close to that. I hope for an improvement version with fixes on the visuals and also a bigger processing power, maybe with the use of the Snapdragon XR2.
Should you buy it?
If you need a practical AR headset with wide FOV and enterprise features, and you can afford to spend more than $2000, yes. Absolutely.
If you need a wide-FOV AR headset and you have a limited budget, go for the Leap Motion North Star. You will have to deal with a bulkier all-in-two device, though.
If you need more enterprise services ready-out-of-the-box and you don’t need a mega-FOV, no go for HoloLens that can offer you all the integrations with Microsoft Azure.
If you need something more affordable and consumer-oriented, no, go for Nreal or one of its clones.
If you are really on a budget (like $30), buy an AR Cardboard holder like Aryzon.
If you like photonic lightfield chips (whatever this means), buy a Magic Leap One.
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