Smart Glasses May Replace Smartphones, Says Jorjin Chairman

Smart glasses enabled by AR/MR technologies may gradually replace smartphones, with such a trend beginning to emerge in 2023 according to Tom Liang, chairman for both Taiwan-based smart glasses designer Jorjin Technologies and Taiwan Smart Glasses Industry Association.

Liang estimates that the global augmented reality (AR) market’s scale to double or even triple on year in 2019 and will grow larger in 2020 with 5G’s commercialization.

Jorjin is the designer of Epson’s recently released AR smart glasses that can be paired with a smartphone for multimedia playback functionalities. Jorjin has also cooperated with telecom carrier Chunghwa Telecom (CHT) to sell the smart glasses in Taiwan.

For the China market, Jorjin has partnered with telecom carrier China Mobile to distribute the wearable device to the local consumer market. The smart glasses is priced at around NT$15,600 (US$507).

Qualcomm has recently unveiled its Snapdragon XR2 platform that supports extended reality (XR) technologies and the platform will have a good chance to become the mainstream system for the next-generation mobile devices and drive up demand for smart glasses.

The Snapdragon XR2 offers performance improvements compared to the company’s existing premium-tier XR platform, delivering two times the CPU and GPU performance, four times more video bandwidth, six times higher resolution and 11 times AI improvement.

The Snapdragon XR2 also supports seven concurrent cameras and a dedicated computer vision processor. Additionally, this is the first XR platform to enable low latency camera pass-through to enhance mixed reality (MR) experience, which allows users to see, interact and create a hybrid of the virtual and real world while wearing a VR device.

With Qualcomm’s XR2 platform, Liang expects demand for smart glasses to pick up dramatically in the next couple of years and white-box smart glasses adopting camera lens and featuring panorama image functionality are expected to carry price tags of only around US$500.

In addition to consumer electronics, smart glasses are also expected to be deployed in medical care-related applications, including surgery. Jorjin’s smart glasses are being tested in Taiwan’s medical centers and the medical-use device may become available by the end of 2020.

Jorjin also supplied the medical smart glasses to its US-based clients for certification by FDA to be used in surgery on knee and hip joints. The company will also unveil several new smart glasses for industrial and smart manufacturing applications at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2020. – Digi Times