Oppo’s Air Glass is an AR experiment with one great idea

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There are glasses that look normal in augmented reality. Major tech companies like Google and Intel are trying to design something that people can wear over their eyes without making them feel weird or uncomfortable. After almost a decade of concerted effort, nobody has cracked this code, but Chinese phone maker Oppo is having some fun with it.

The Air Glass is a heads up display for the company's phones. The Air Glass is only sold in limited quantities in China and will be replaced with a next-gen version. It costs around $745 and is a demo, but it is a consumer-oriented augmented reality device.

The Air Glass accepts hardware limitations to play with an interesting form factor. After getting a set of glasses and a compatible phone to try out, I have found a design idea so obvious that I am surprised I haven't seen it more often.

Photo by Adi Robertson / The Verge

The Air Glass is more like a simple notification machine than a realistic hologram.

The Air Glass is a two-piece design instead of being built into a pair of glasses. The system described above has a port that looks like an Apple MagSafe port. A pair of custom-designed metal glasses frames have a magnetic nub on the temple. The frames are ordinary glasses but fit the lens system along the right side. The curved charging case that looks like a shoe horn is what you will use to charge the device after you use the augmented reality component.

You will get a green heads-up display that covers a small but significant chunk of your vision when you pair the Air Glass with an Oppo phone. In a mostly good way, the virtual overlay is high-contrast, reasonably visible in everything but bright sunlight, and avoids feeling like a washed-out phone screen like some full-color augmented reality displays do. I kept the clock display on for nearly three hours without running out of battery, and the charging case was supposed to hold a charge for 10 hours, but I never charged it.

The theory behind Oppo's design is great because it's a strong tactic for offering lots of style options while also reducing the tendency for people to stare at the screen. Nine years ago, Google Glass put an expensive camera and projection system in front of the wearer's eyes at all times, something that felt awkward at best and intrusive at worst. To use the more polite version of the term, you had to put them on. Since then, companies like North have built more subtle glasses, but they still rely on the idea of having electronics on your face full time.

The Air Glass is better for your eyes than the other way around. The low tech magnetic nubs blend right into the frames and seem to be easy to add to a variety of styles. The magnetic hold between the 30-gram lens apparatus and the frame is quite solid, but it's trivially easy to remove the augmented reality portion and stick it in the case even if you wear prescription glasses full-time. It's a solution that takes people's concerns about privacy and distraction seriously instead of just trying to hide the thing they're anxious about inside a smaller package. This generation of Air Glass doesn't have a camera, but Oppo isn't ruling out the option for future versions.

You can use the companion app to manage the simple applications in the form ofcards. You can use the side trackpad to turn the glasses display on and off, or you can use the opening card to launch it in the glasses. I didn't have glasses that could long-press for voice commands or gestures.

The time or weather are displayed on the cards. There are more complex cards that open turn-by-turn walking directions, display near-real-time language translation, or load text files to create an augmented reality device. I used the glasses as a hands-free screen to cook dinner one night after I wrote the recipe in a Word document.

It is a good set of features, but the average experience is very rough for anyone who doesn't speak Chinese. Turn-by-turn navigation tools and voice commands haven't been implemented in English, so I muddled through them with the help of the internet. Both seemed clunky within my limited abilities.

Automatic translation is limited to English and Chinese, and it isn't as seamless as we thought it would be. I was unable to try the option for two sets of glasses.

The phone side wouldn't recognize that I'd spoken after hitting the button when I used the translation system to talk to myself. It took several seconds to translate short messages from either my native English or my very rusty Mandarin, which is a reminder that real-time translation still has limitations.

Even though the non-AR frames are normal, the total package is still ridiculous-looking. The lens-over-lens design of the glasses looks silly because of the different shapes of the frame and the waveguide. The glasses will show whatever is on your screen to the outside world, heightening their retro-Sci-fi vibe. The design is barely heavier than a pair of sunglasses, but it tilts to one side, which is visible from the outside. It is easy to imagine glasses designers building compatible magnetic nubs onto different styles of frames, but it is not clear if the lens would perform equally well on top of different shapes and sizes.

I had a lot of comfort problems with the optics. Within minutes of putting on the glasses, I developed a throbbing head. The eyes felt strained after I wore them, but they seem to have gotten better over time.

I inquired about the problem and was told that monocular displays can cause headaches for some buyers. Karl Guttag agreed that the single lens could be the reason for the problem. Guttag suggested that I try to keep my other eye focused on the distance to make sure I don't get a conflict between the two eyes.

I have used Google Glass in the same way I have used other things. Guttag suggested that the MicroLED flicker might cause sickness for some people, although he said I would have likely noticed a problem with the HoloLens 2 as well.

I don't know how widespread my reaction is, but my husband wore the Air Glass eyepiece for around 15 minutes, and I had no headaches. I don't know what's causing it since I've been fine in headsets with similar designs. A risk of physical pain being something of a dealbreaker for many tech consumers is an example of the difficulties that augmented reality adds to computing.

The Air Glass is seen as a possible range of head-worn devices. It doesn't have the same features as Nreal's consumer smart glasses, which let you watch streaming video and play games. The goal is not to have an all-in-one computing package. It is similar to the glasses equivalent of a watch.

The Air Glass is a cool experience even though I will probably never see one in America. It's a form factor that Apple and Meta don't seem to be seriously exploring, addressing some of my biggest concerns with augmented reality as a platform. There is plenty of room to get weird in the field of consumer glasses.