Osterhout Design Group seems to have become ready to compete with Microsoft in hologram glasses market. The company is quite well known for its industrial as well as medical heads-up displays, and it has currently announced two pairs of glasses, focusing for a wider audience. The R-8 and R-9 come in a compact design and are comparatively cheaper. The glasses will soon be available right after a major fundraising round for ODG, along with a recent partnership with China Mobile’s Migu Video.
Image Source: osterhoutgroup.com
The R-8 and R-9 glasses have both been powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chip, and they run ODG’s Android Nougat 7.0 which is based on Reticle OS. Both the pairs come with six-degree-of-freedom tracking, which is quite similar to Microsoft HoloLens. As per the earlier announcement of Project Horizon prototype, the R-9 is the high-end model which has been designed so as to provide additional industrial options. It comes with 50-degree field view, 1080p resolution, and 13-megapixel front-facing camera which can record 4K video.
There is an extension port available in R-9 glasses, which allows the companies to attach specialized sensor modules, adding features, such as improved environmental scanning or low-light vision. The expected price of the glasses is around $1,800 and it would be shipped in the second quarter of 2017, to be widely released soon after.
The R-8 comes with a field view of 40-degree, a display of 720p resolution, and it does not have any port for expansion modules. It weights around 4.5 ounces making it lighter than R-9 which weights around 6.5 ounces. The expected price of R-8 will be under $1,000. It also comes with two camera of 1080p on the front which will be able to capture stereo video. The R-8 is expected to be shipped around the second half of 2017.
ODG has gone on to admit that these glasses are not designed to be worn all the time. It has been designed for watching movies on digital big screen, for playing games, or for using apps.
Ralph Osterhout, Founder and CEO of ODG,
states,
“ODG is pioneering glasses for the masses that play movies with cinematic clarity, drop you inside immersive 3D interactive experiences, and reveal new worlds of invention and productivity. This is so much bigger than just a device, it’s about a whole new computing medium that will transform how we interact with and discover information and engage with people and objects in the world around us.”
Well, whatever the company says, we know one thing for sure. The coming age is going to be extremely competitive and awesome in terms of unbelievable development and smart inventions in the field of Augmented Reality.