Yesterday I was visiting the amazing people of VRTUOLUO, which is one of the leading XR publications in China, and they were so kind to let me enter their lab, where they have all the headsets they have reviewed these years. It was for me the occasion of seeing and trying briefly some devices that I had never tried or that I did not even know existed. It was a fun moment, so I want to share it with you in this post. Anyway, be sure to take it as a way to lightly talk about some XR glasses and not as a full review: I’ve just tried these headsets for like 1 minute each, so these can’t be considered real hands-on sessions, but just some very early impressions.
(By the way, this is my first post about my trip to China, and many others are to come, so stay tuned!)
LAWK
The LAWK glasses surprised me on the shelves of the lab because they looked like ski glasses. They are actually quite cool to wear, and with them on, I felt a bit like Frozone from the Incredibles. I’ve found them also quite comfortable, even if the frames were big.
These are smart glasses with a single waveguide that projects green monochrome information. I have not been able to test them much, but they are clearly meant to be paired with the smartphone to show notifications and similar stuff.
The green monochrome display is actually quite bright, so the information on the screen was very well visible.
Nreal Air
I’ve finally been able to try the Nreal Air, the glasses for media consumption created by Nreal that have been quite successful until now (the company claims more than 100,000 glasses sold).
The glasses are lightweight and comfortable. The only problem is the cable: the glasses are tethered, and the tether ends with a USB-C port that enters into your phone. The tether is attached to one of the frames of the glass, and I could clearly feel it pushing my ear, which was not ideal.
They are also quite stylish to wear and look like sunglasses. Stylewise, though, I have to add that for my personal taste they look more like glasses that fit a woman than a man, but this is just my opinion.
The guy from Vrtuoluo launched a video on his phone, and I could see it in front of me on the glasses. The visual quality looked good, and also the audio was ok, even if the speakers were very little on this device. The only problem was that it didn’t look to me like having a “big screen in front of my eyes” as claimed by the company… it just seemed to me to have a video attached to my face. Which is technically the same thing, but I expected something like a magical effect that made me feel like being inside a cinema and looking at its giant screen. It’s absolutely not like that.
Rokid Air Glasses + Rokid Station
Rokid has recently announced its “Rokid Station”, which is a device that can work with the Rokid Air Glasses. The Station has a double purpose: working as a computational unit, so you don’t have to fry the battery of your phone to power the AR glasses, and acting as a controller, thanks to the buttons and the touchpad on it.
I found it a pretty original solution, but unluckily I haven’t been able to try it because the battery of the Rokid Station was drained out. Which was an interesting thing per se: it reminds us that one of the disadvantages of having a separate device to power our AR glasses is that you have to continuously recharge this other device (besides your smartphone), too.
The Station looked a bit bulky, but was also quite ergonomic in my hand, and interacting with its touchpad was fine.
LLvision
LLvision glasses are meant to do live transcription (and eventually translation) of dialogues. They seem cool for accessibility or other specific purposes. I haven’t been able to try their service for some technical issues we were having in the lab, but at least I could see that the glasses are very lightweight and the text inside was readable. Stylewise, they are ok too, but probably Nreal Air is slightly cooler.
It was interesting to discover this device because it is not a general-purpose smartglass, but one with a single specific purpose.
Old iQiYi PC VR headset
There was a PCVR headset taking dust on the shelves that had quite a weird shape (it reminded me a bit the Judge Dredd movie), so I wanted to try it. Turns out it was an old iQiYi PCVR headset, which I put on my head to feel the comfort even if it was full of dirt and dust (this is how COVID-23 was born).
I think that the engineer doing it, instead of taking inspiration for the comfort from standard glasses, or ski glasses, or moto helmets, took inspiration from a nutcracker. The fitting mechanism is something like a rigid but elastic plastic claw that starts from the top of the headset and ends with the claw on your nape, pushing it so that the headset remains pressed against your face. The result is that you have the impression all the time that the device wants to crack your head. 100% useful as a torture machine.
iQiYi Mix
iQiYi Mix is a standalone headset made by iQiYi which has the unique characteristic of having two dedicated front RGB cameras for passthrough AR. This device so doesn’t need any weird calculation to create the colored passthrough stream, because it natively records it in color.
This sounds like a good idea, so I wanted to try it. And after my test, I can confirm that the colors in the passthrough were indeed ok. But the passthrough resolution was still as grainy as in other commercial VR headsets and especially all the stereo disparity was totally off, so my eyes were crossing and hurting while looking into it. I thought it could be an IPD problem, but the IPD is fixed on this headset, so… well… I had no solution to have a good passthrough. But at least I found that the headset has a flip-up design, so you still have a good way to see reality…
But there’s even more: I switched to VR, and I found myself in the system menu. The visual experience was similar to one of other standalone devices like the Quest 2. I tried moving, and the tracking was clearly lagging, resulting in a quite dizzying experience.
Let’s say I had no luck with iQiYi headsets…
Pico lenses comparison
At the end of the visit, the VRTUOLUO people also let me see the difference between the lenses of the Pico Neo 3 (Fresnel) and Pico 4 (Pancake). Well, the whole optical module on the 4 looks much smaller…
And that’s it for this fast testing session of headsets. I hope you enjoyed it… but as I’ve already told you, don’t consider this as a review of these devices!