January 7, 2019 – nreal, developer of mixed reality (MR) glasses, has today announced nreal light, its first flagship ready-to-wear mixed reality glasses.
nreal light features a consumer-focused design that favours comfort, weighing only 85 grams – only slightly heavier than a pair of sunglasses. The company added that its MR glasses can be worn for hours at a time, and improvements in comfort have not meant sacrifices to display quality.
nreal stated that despite its compact form factor, nreal light is still able to achieve highly accurate and realistic interactions between digital avatars and the real world. Algorithms track the environment to make virtual objects interact with the real world, all of which is powered by its Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm and only two onboard cameras.
nreal light’s display has a 52º Field of View (FoV) and 1080p resolution. Visual experiences are driven by a companion computing pack which is built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 Mobile VR Platform. Furthermore, these visuals are augmented by 360° spatial sound through dual speakers, whilst dual microphones offer control of the virtual environment through voice inputs. Additionally, nreal light comes with a controller that allows for three degrees of freedom, and provides haptic feedback responsiveness to offer an immersive mixed reality experience.
“Our advanced heterogeneous compute platform, Snapdragon 845 Mobile VR Platform, coupled with nreal’s sleek form factor yet high performance glass truly demonstrate that the future of XR is near,” said Hugo Swart, Head of XR at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “XR is the next mobile computing platform and these types of integrated, light, capable solutions that are designed to seamlessly blend immersive experiences with the real world, drive the ecosystem forward and enable many new enterprise applications to emerge while bringing us closer to consumer adoption.”
nreal light also comes with interchangeable prescription lenses, and is available in several colors. The glasses also have cross-platform compatibility. A universal USB-C port not only supports nreal light’s proprietary companion computing pack, but it can also plug and play content from most USB-C compatible devices including laptops and desktops.
“nreal aims at developing next generation augmented user experience, by blending the virtual content with the real world through mixed reality glasses. Not only can we provide a truly immersive experience, but we can also make it accessible by everyone, easily, and in a very comfortable fashion”, said Chi Xu, founder and CEO of nreal. “We’re excited to introduce nreal light, truly radical new mixed reality glasses that are designed to be comfortable and light and offer a fully immersive mixed reality experience.”
In addition to the announcement of nreal light, the company also announced it had managed to obtain a total of USD $15 million in Series A fundraising from Shunwei Capital, China Growth Capital (CGC), APlus, Siasun and iQIYI.
“We were greatly excited when we saw the mixed reality glasses developed by nreal, which strike the right balance between convenient size and user experience, and have strong market potential, which is why we decided to partner with nreal for future content offerings,” said Zhang Hang, Senior Director at iQIYI. “iQIYI believes that with the popularization of mixed reality hardware, original content and experiences adapted to MR devices will appear as well. We are optimistic to the ‘fourth screen’ and looking forward to shaping the future entertainment experience with more partners such as nreal.”
Image credit: nreal
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Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past seven years.