China's Oppo Debuts 'mixed Reality' Headset As Apple, Microsoft Explore Similar Devices
- Chinese electronics giant Oppo unveiled its mixed reality headset on Wednesday, tapping into an area in which US tech companies Microsoft and Apple have shown keen interest.
- Oppo MR Glass Developer Edition is designed for developers to build apps and understand the best use of mixed reality technology.
- Augmented and mixed reality are areas that tech giants from Microsoft to Apple are targeting for precisely this potential.
© Provided by CNBC Oppo MR Glass Developer Edition will be available to developers in China in the second half of this year.Chinese electronics giant Oppo unveiled its mixed reality headset on Wednesday, tapping into an area in which US tech companies Microsoft and Apple have shown keen interest.
Oppo MR Glass Developer Edition is designed for developers to build apps and understand the best use of mixed reality technology. The headphones are equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Plus chip.
Mixed reality refers to technologies including virtual reality and augmented reality (AR). People can put on headphones and see digital images or videos applied to the real world in front of them.
Oppo is confident in the future of mixed reality and sees it as the next computing platform after smartphones.
"This has the potential to be a new computing platform," Xu Yi, Oppo's XR chief technology officer, told CNBC.
Oppo has been working on AR glasses for several years, and last year it released its latest version, the Oppo Air Glass 2. The device looks just like a regular pair of glasses.
Meanwhile, the MR Glass Developer Edition is a larger headset that comes with a controller that allows users to interact with what they see in front of them.
Xu acknowledged that mixed reality "still needs a lot of improvements, including technology and applications, to become a real or successful product." .
"Everyone wants to do AR because the potential is huge, but the technology is not there yet, it may take a few years," Xu said.
That's why Oppo is trying to encourage developers to create apps that will make mixed reality popular. The company will make its headphones available to developers in China in the second half of this year. He said he has no intention of selling the device commercially yet.
Xu said mixed reality will eventually lead to full augmented reality, which is currently being tested but is still in its early stages and not yet a mass-market product. Xu envisions AR devices as devices that users will use all day.
"AR will become something like a smartphone. Because the ideal AR is where you can use it all day, with all the features, one day it will be comparable in size to the smartphone market," Xu said.
AR and mixed reality is an area that tech giants are paying a lot of attention to globally because of this potential. Microsoft has its own HoloLens device, a senior Samsung executive told CNBC in February that the company is working on a roadmap for its own mixed reality device. Meanwhile, Chinese tech company Xiaomi launched its own AR headset this year.
It has been reported that Apple has been developing its own headphones for a long time. In an interview with GQ earlier this year, the company's CEO Tim Cook explained why people might need mixed reality headsets in the future.
"The idea of overlaying the physical world with things in the digital world can greatly improve the way people communicate, how people connect," Cook told GQ.
