Lenovo today unveiled its new sleek and lightweight AR glasses called the Thinkreality A3. The glasses can be connected to your computer or a Motorola phone via a USB-C cable, but unfortunately these are only for enterprise customers.
The headset is powered by Qualcomm’s XR1 mixed reality platform. It has 1080p stereoscopic screens for each eye lens. It has dual fisheye cameras around the room to locate and map you. Plus, an 8-megapixel 1080p camera that sits right above your nose to stream your views to remote teams.
Lenovo says that you can fold these glasses like any sunglasses and sneak them into your suitcase. It will also provide a carrying case with the device.
There are two editions of these glasses. The PC edition is plugged into your system and designed to provide a virtual monitoring experience; you can set up five of them. It can display your existing applications on these large virtual monitors without taking up physical space.
It looks great for professionals who work from home and do not have room for extra monitors. But the A3 will not be cheap, and that means freelancers or creative people can not use it yet.
There is also an industrial edition that allows you to pair the headset to select Motorola phones, and with which you can perform your tasks in AR. This will enable people working on a factory floor or a production line to watch a large number of operations while they are busy. Plus, you can add extra lenses to the front for eye protection.
Lenovo is facing competition from other players like Microsoft and Google in the enterprise market. However, it believes that this is a good time at the moment to hold this market and not switch to the consumer side.
Nathan Pettyjohn, commercial chief for AR and VR at the company, said that AR will be in the works for the next few years:
In the next three to five years, we will see that the ability to use augmented reality everywhere and at work will grow exponentially. Plus, powerful disk drives and 5G rollout will allow us to create more use cases from this technology.
The company plans to ship this product by mid-2021. We do not know the pricing of the ThinkReality A3, but since the A6 is higher than $ 2,000, the new device will not be cheap.
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Published on January 10, 2021 – 14:00 UTC