Shenzhen multinational Tecno is taking the wearable camera fight to Meta Ray-Bans with a pair of AI-driven glasses that borrow imaging tech from the company's flagship smartphone to offer mobile life-loggers "industry-leading" resolution plus augmented-reality.
The Tecno AI Glass Series was announced at the Mobile World Congress expo in Barcelona last week, and is made up of two models – a standard version and a Pro flavor.
They're each built around the same photographic heart – which sees custom lens modules and an OV50D imaging sensor join hands with signal processing and "advanced imaging algorithms" that have trickled their way to the wearable from the company's flagship Camon 40 Premier smartphone. As such, Tecno boasts that the Series offers the industry's highest pixel count for an AI glasses photography system in the world, at 50 megapixels.
Tecno has cooked in exclusive filters to help make photos pop, though it's not clear how these are activated. A SmartSnap feature is also reported capable of intelligently recognizing scenes, offering assistance during shooting and automatically coming up with "attractive captions" to enable super-quick sharing of on-the-go imagery on socials.
The Pro model can augment the world in front of your eyes via "advanced WaveGuide technology" co-developed with Meta-Bounds and a MicroLED screen. Whether used for turn-by-turn navigation, real-time translations or on-the-spot info, the AR display puts out more than 1,500 nits of brightness – which should keep the AR content visible in most lighting conditions – and offers a 30-degree field of view.
Physical controls are available on the arms, where a tap can activate Tecno's Ella AI assistant for smart help when you need it via voice commands. The AI can also summarize information, plan activities and to-do lists, take memos and set reminders, and offer real-time translations of more than 100 languages. It can even join forces with the imagery engine and use object recognition to identify and detail a restaurant or make food recommendations, for example. All such functionality is controlled and managed through a mobile app for Android.
Each wearable is fashioned using magnesium-alloy and composites. The standard variant flies with aviator styling and the camera module to the side, while the Pro model rolls with a "browline" style and central camera. The 250-mAh battery is reckoned good for 11 hours of music playback through the frame-integrated 180-mm speakers for 30 minutes on quick charge, or 8 hours of mixed use. And rounding out the known specs are Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 wireless connectivity.
The Tecno AI Glasses mark an impressive debut in the space for the company, but we don't have any info on pricing or availability at this time. MWC reps merely hinted that the wearables should land at a much lower price point than the current version of the Meta Ray-Bans.
Source: Tecno
