In AR/VR Development
Nreal Light AR specs put to the test - read the full article about AR technology, AR/VR Development and Augmented & Virtual Reality Solutions from BBC Click on Qualified.One
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Ive tried a few augmented reality headsets in this job and these are probably the closest to a practical consumer product Ive seen.
When I first tried these Nreal Light glasses almost two years ago at the CES tech show I was quite impressed.
Theyre light enough to throw in your bag and they do give you these bright, crisp visuals overlaid on the real world.
Now theyve finally gone on sale in the USA and I would say theyre probably still a stepping-stone product to full AR glasses.
And heres why.
The glasses have to be tethered to your Android smartphone to provide the visuals and also the battery power and that means you dont have to charge your glasses which is great but it will drain your phones battery a bit quicker.
It has built-in speakers and microphones and cameras in the front to track the room, so that the visuals all stay in the right place where theyre supposed to.
You have full freedom to get up and walk around and look at things and the perspective changes as you move.
It is really quite cool.
The visuals come from two high-definition OLED panels in the glasses that are beamed into your eyes by the lenses and the visuals really do look bright and sharp.
Its like a projector is shining images on the walls around you.
The visuals dont fill your entire field of vision.
Turn your head and things start to disappear.
Nreal says the glasses have a 52 degree field of view.
In practice, it means whatever youre looking directly towards is visible and things start to tail off in your peripheral vision.
They managed to squeeze all of this into a fairly ordinary looking pair of sunglasses although whether you think these look fashionable is probably subjective.
I have had a few people say these look like Dad sunglasses and also the meme sunglasses.
They also sit quite high up on your nose and quite proud of your face and they have to because otherwise this black bar at the top which is not transparent would block your field of view.
They are also not the lightest at 112g which is a lot more than a regular pair of glasses. Wearing that for long times you start to feel they are a bit heavier than glasses.
Nreal has developed an app called Nebula which acts as your home screen and you use your tethered phone as a remote to point at what you want and tap the screen to click.
You can launch mixed-reality apps or pin web-browser windows around your room.
I tried this in the kitchen by pinning a virtual recipe to the wall and then I can look at my cooking and just turned my head and looked at the wall to see my recipe.
I suppose it was a little bit more convenient than having to check my phone and unlock my phone when Ive got raw ingredients on my hands.
But the trade-off is that you have to wear augmented reality glasses while youre cooking.
You can also pin a huge virtual display on the wall so it looks like youre watching TV or a film on a huge cinema screen.
Although I already have quite a big TV in my living room and if Im somewhere else like in a hotel or on the train I can usually get by just fine watching TV on my phone.
There are obviously some games to play.
One is this ghost-shooting game where the ghosts are overlaid on your real living room and another app turns your desk into a tower-defence game.
So you can walk around and see in 3D.
Definitely cool to try and I think anyone that has a go on this would say: ah, that was very impressive as a tech demo.
I dont know how often you would go back to these games.
The graphics are sort of smartphone quality.
Theyre like mini games you might play to kill a few minutes on the Tube whereas Im more likely to stay immersed in a story game thats hours long if I play on my console.
With console games I can also control all the action just by moving my thumbs a little bit.
I dont have to get up off the sofa and walk around my dining room table.
Perhaps with virtual reality theres more of an argument for that because youre fully immersed and transported away to a faraway world.
But with AR Im projecting items on to my dining room table and I sort of think whats the point? Ive seen plenty of my dining room table for the last two years.
For me the real potential in this lies in productivity.
Imagine being able to go to a coffee shop, putting these on and seeing three huge virtual monitors.
So you could do some video editing without needing to bring a display with you.
The closest I got was plugging this into my laptop and the glasses then act as a second monitor, so I can look down at my laptop to see my timeline and look up into the display and see the footage I was editing on a huge screen.
Even though you can move around the room wearing these they still feel like quite a stationary experience to me.
I dont think you would want to wear these on your commute or while youre out shopping. They are not the kind of glasses where you are going to see notifications flying in or see real-world maps and directions superimposed on the street in front of you.
Its not that kind of augmented reality experience.
Although it has an idea of what we might get in the future.
For that to happen Id expect these glasses to get lighter and obscure less of your field of view.
Youd need to get rid of this tether and you dont want to use the phone as a control, you want some hand recognition which Nreal is working on.
Once some big companies like Apple or Facebook enter the space and throw some of their big apps on to the platform you can really see the potential.
But as an early entry into the space it gives you a flavour of what the technology can do.
BBC Click: Nreal Light AR specs put to the test - AR/VR Development