For several months the metaverse sector has been waiting for news, which are now about to arrive. After Meta, to date the only company to have put on sale a viewer for its metaverse, it is Oppo to make its moves in the world of "mixed" reality. Waiting to know Apple's RealityPro, viewers that should be unveiled on Monday at the WWDC 2023 developer conference, Oppo's Mr Glass Developer Edition already represent a valid alternative to the Meta Quest Pro. The device of the Chinese company promises experiences of both virtual reality and increases, "mixed" in fact, thanks to a system of video cameras that are able to open the surrounding scenario to allow the wearer of the viewers not to lose track of what is around, superimposing digital content on the real environment.
Mr Glass is based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon Xr2 Plus platform, and doesn't need to be hooked onto a computer to work. The name itself, Developer Edition, distinguishes the first, and current, audience of interest: developers. It is therefore a viewer that is not yet ready to debut for the mass market but a way, as Oppo itself explains, to give professionals time to understand how to take advantage of mixed reality and create new experiences and applications.
"Technologies like augmented reality have huge potential but the road is still long, it could take years to bring it to the general public," Xu Yi, director of Oppo's XR division, told CNBC. "For sure, augmented reality will become as popular as smartphones and its market will overlap with today's mobile phone market." The Mr Glass Developer Edition will go on sale, initially in China, in the second half of the year, in limited numbers and only to developers.