Ahead of its September 15 major announcement, Xiaomi steals the thunder from the recently announced collaboration between Facebook and Ray-Ban by announcing its own set of Smart Glasses. Classified as a “wearable device concept”, Xiaomi’s take on Smart Glasses has a display etched into the optics themselves that display notification, make calls, help you navigate, take photos, and even translate text in real-time. Think of it as the Iron Man glasses Peter Parker wore in Spider-Man.
The display itself makes use of MicroLEDs for backlighting, with the display chip measuring at a tiny 2.4mmx2.02mm, which is roughly the size of a grain of rice. The individual pixels are sized at 4um, with makes fitting the display into the glasses possible. While it is only a monochrome panel, the tiny display can go as bright as 2 million nits, making them very, very usable in bright sunlight–at least in theory.
Xiaomi claims that the MicroLED display makes use of optical waveguide technology to refract light at 180 degrees and accurately transmit light beams to the human eye. The optical waveguide has a grating structure that makes use of a single lens.
Similar to Facebook’s Smart Glasses, Xiaomi makes use of a voice assistant–XiaoAI specifically–to interact with the glasses. You also get dual beamforming mics and speakers, along with a 5-megapixel camera for taking photos. Powering it is a quad-core ARM processor, with the Smart Glasses containing chips for Bluetooth, WiFi, a touchpad, and a custom version of Android.
Before you get excited about it, do note that this is a concept device, and there is no word if Xiaomi will intend to make its Smart Glasses a consumer product for the time being. Instead, this “wearable device concept” is aimed towards giving a peek at the future and with what Xiaomi is capable of.
