A pair of AR glasses designed for everyone.

AI+AR is changing everything. This is my deepest impression after leaving the Rokid new product launch event. On the newly released Rokid Glasses, AI+AR has become a way for us to truly interact with the world, a better way.

When dreams come true, many people's first reaction may be disbelief. But the fact is happening right in front of us.

On November 18, Hangzhou. At the Rokid Jungle 2024 Partner and New Product Launch Event, Rokid officially unveiled the new generation of AR glasses co-branded with BOLON Eyewear - Rokid Glasses.

As expected, Rokid Glasses amazed everyone. On Rokid Glasses, we not only see the functional and experiential upgrades brought about by the comprehensive integration of AI, but also a highly integrated wireless all-in-one design that integrates the motherboard, battery, and optical display module into a single pair of glasses.

More importantly, all of this is achieved in a form factor that is almost indistinguishable from traditional glasses. Coupled with the fashionable design jointly created with the renowned fashion eyewear brand BOLON Eyewear and the glasses' lightweight of just 49 grams, it signifies the democratization of AI and AR technology, making it accessible for ordinary people to wear and use in their daily lives, just like wearing regular glasses.

At the same time, Rokid Glasses, with its display capabilities, also offers a very competitive price: 2499 yuan. According to the plan, Rokid Glasses will go on sale in the second quarter of next year.

Many people, including myself, have always believed that after personal computers and smartphones, the digital and physical worlds will inevitably converge from separation, and the future of human-computer interaction lies in AR glasses that integrate the two. However, we are also aware that every technological evolution requires solving countless practical problems. Just like smartphones in the past, the journey from concept to popularity was fraught with challenges.

After all, imagining and predicting the future has never been the hardest part; the hardest part is always creating the future.

The only difference is that there are differences everywhere

The simplest way to demonstrate the uniqueness of Rokid Glasses is through its teleprompter function. Whether giving a speech, hosting an event, or recording a video, users only need to wear Rokid Glasses to see the teleprompter content in their field of vision, without the need for additional equipment or adjustments to meet their needs.

But the teleprompter is just the beginning. Based on the deep integration of AI and AR, Rokid Glasses bring more daily possibilities.

Imagine being in a foreign country for business travel or to visit relatives, and facing language barriers is a common challenge. You might need to understand information on a road sign or sit in a restaurant with a menu full of foreign languages. At this time, Rokid Glasses can use AI's visual perception to translate and directly display the translated information in front of your eyes, eliminating the need to worry about not being able to hear clearly in a noisy restaurant environment or forgetting and needing to repeat translations and listening.

This transformation is even more evident in navigation scenarios. Rokid Glasses support real-time AI navigation, whether you're riding a bike daily or walking around in an unfamiliar city, you can simply ask AI for directions with a sentence, and it will provide precise guidance in the real world while broadcasting real-time traffic information into your ears.

In a nutshell, Rokid Glasses bring the capabilities of AI to your ears and eyes through AR, also unprecedentedly expanding and extending human senses.

Compared to the so-called "smart glasses" of the past, if there is any fundamental change in today's smart glasses, it must be the "intelligent evolution" brought about by large models, especially the more powerful natural language understanding and multimodal capabilities of AI, making voice interaction truly usable and user-friendly. This change is even more evident on Rokid Glasses.

By deeply integrating multimodal large models, Rokid Glasses can not only achieve natural and smooth AI voice interaction but also utilize the camera on the glasses to allow AI to perceive the surrounding environment visually, enabling experiences such as AI chat and Q&A, object recognition, and photo-based question answering based on the real world.

However, pure voice interaction has its limitations, as a means of information transmission, voice is far less efficient and accurate than vision. This further highlights the importance and necessity of AR glasses.

As a product platform company focused on human-computer interaction technology, Rokid is clearly more aware of this than other manufacturers, not only incorporating clever designs such as answering or rejecting calls with head movements. More importantly, as a new generation of AR glasses, the core of Rokid Glasses lies in supporting both AI visual perception (input) and AR display (output) at the visual interaction level, offering a qualitative difference in experience compared to other smart glasses.

These qualitative differences are inseparable from the support of AI and AR display capabilities. Imagine, if relying solely on voice or hearing, how can navigation information be accurately conveyed? How can translated content be intuitively presented? However, on Rokid Glasses, visual interaction refreshes these scenarios, making information transmission more efficient and natural through a "what you see is what you get" approach.

Numerous studies have also proven that humans acquire over 80% of their information through vision, which further illustrates that AR glasses are the ideal carrier for AI - they can not only listen but also see and communicate complex information in a visible manner.

Correspondingly, the capabilities and potential demonstrated by Rokid Glasses naturally attract technology companies driven by innovation in different fields, including well-known technology companies such as DingTalk, iQIYI, Bilibili, Taobao, and Zhixiang Weilai, which appeared as Rokid's partners at the Rokid Glasses launch event.

In particular, we saw that by connecting to ZhiXiaoBao, Rokid Glasses can achieve one-sentence taxi booking and Alipay payments based on voiceprint recognition, further expanding the daily use scenarios of Rokid Glasses.

Behind this, it is not only because these innovative companies have seen the profound changes brought about by AI+AR in human-computer interaction but also because they have recognized the key role played by Rokid, especially in Rokid Glasses.

What makes a truly everyday AR glass difficult?

To date, AR glasses have gained a certain level of user awareness, but how to truly transform this "user awareness" into "user habits" or achieve the "daily use" of AR glasses has always been a challenging proposition: they must be lightweight yet powerful; they must have the natural appearance of glasses but can accommodate all the possibilities of future technology.

The emergence of Rokid Glasses seems to provide an answer to this question - a lightweight wearing experience of just 49 grams, a wireless all-in-one design, and the support of Qualcomm's first-generation Snapdragon AR1 chip, achieving a 90% charge in just 10 minutes and a full charge in 20 minutes. The glasses case also provides up to 10 additional charges, allowing Rokid Glasses to deeply integrate AI+AR technology while being a pair of AR glasses truly suitable for daily wear and use.

Especially in terms of wearability, this time Rokid has collaborated with the renowned fashion eyewear brand BOLON Eyewear to integrate the comfort and aesthetic design of traditional glasses into Rokid Glasses, making them look indistinguishable from a pair of traditional fashion glasses. You can easily wear them on the street.

However, this seemingly simple design is the result of numerous refinements and technological accumulations. For AR glasses to become a part of daily wear, it is necessary to deeply integrate optical display technology with software and hardware to maximize the capabilities of AI and achieve a better AR experience. This is also the most difficult part.

First, it must be clarified that the essence of AR glasses is to merge the digital and physical worlds, so it is essential to be able to see both the real environment and display virtual content through the lenses. On this path, Rokid Glasses use glass diffraction waveguide technology to naturally present virtual content in the real environment within ultra-thin lenses, without making users feel a sense of disconnection.

At the same time, AR glasses need to "make the best of a bad situation," but achieving powerful functionality and experience within extremely limited space requires the core of deep integration and collaboration between software and hardware.

To maximize the capabilities of AI+AR, Rokid has done a lot of work at the system and algorithm levels, continuously iterating and improving its self-developed spatial operating system YodaOS-Master to enable extreme utilization of hardware resources: achieving a triple-screen efficient experience with Rokid AR Lite and precise spatial positioning and gesture recognition with a monocular camera on Rokid AR Studio.

Behind the everyday design of Rokid Glasses lies a decade of Rokid's technological accumulation and innovation capabilities in AI+AR.

Of course, for Rokid Glasses to become a truly everyday product, the key also lies in a deep understanding of user needs and a strong ecosystem. Rokid's answer to this is: not only to delve deeply into technology but also to define scenarios.

By deeply exploring user scenarios, Rokid has not only realized functions such as AI real-time navigation and multilingual translation but has also attracted many partners to jointly build an ecosystem: the collaboration with DingTalk opens up new possibilities for AR office work, the collaboration with Taobao introduces AR into the online shopping experience, and the collaboration with Zhixiang Weilai realizes AI-generated 3D content on AR devices.

From the user's perspective, these collaborations continuously enrich the usage scenarios of Rokid AR glasses. From an industry perspective, these collaborations not only help AR glasses truly integrate into users' daily lives but also contribute to building an AR paradigm for the present and the future.

Ten years, the end of a beginning

Ten years ago, in 2014, inspired by Google Glass, Misa founded Rokid. Since then, the AR industry has experienced several ups and downs over the past decade. But every time the tide recedes and then rises again, it reaffirms the tenacious vitality of AR technology.

At the same time, Rokid and the entire industry have been exploring and iterating AR technology, contemplating its value to consumers, and witnessing its gradual recognition and acceptance.

Ten years later today, Rokid Glasses have brought many people's dreams of AR glasses into reality: lightweight enough to be worn all day like regular glasses yet powerful enough to integrate digital content into real space. It can be said that compared to Rokid Glass, the first-generation product five years ago, Rokid Glasses have become a pair of AR glasses truly designed for everyone.

But just like Churchill's quote, "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." From Rokid Glass to Rokid Glasses, this marks the end of one phase and the beginning of the next.

Kevin Kelly, in his new book "What Technology Wants," writes, "We are on the cusp of a new and vast platform where everything in the world is connected to AI. The digital and physical worlds are perfectly integrated, and this is what we call the new platform of AR or the mirrored world."

Lightweight and comfortable wearing experience, powerful AI+AR capabilities, all of which make Rokid Glasses a bridge accelerating the integration of the digital world and the physical world. Rokid is now standing at a new crossroads, ready to turn dreams into reality in the next decade and write a new chapter for AR technology.

Currently, Rokid has also launched a special offer - pay only 9.9 yuan to obtain an F code worth 200 yuan. This activity has officially launched on the Rokid official WeChat public account, and interested users can pre-order Rokid Glasses in advance.

Source: Leitech