Oppo reveals rollable phone, more

Oppo held its first Inno Day event last year, which featured an AR Glass headset and a concept phone with a built-in selfie camera. The company has now officially launched its Inno Day 2020 event. What did she have to show this time?

True to the tease, the manufacturer showed the rollable phone Oppo X 2021 concept. The concept device initially has a 6.7-inch OLED screen. However, if you drag on the right side, the maximum screen size is 7.4 inches. In fact, the brand claims that this solution does not allow wrinkles on the display as we see with leaflets. A video embedded below shows the mechanism in action and a USB-C port on the bottom right of the device.

According to Oppo, this design is made possible by various technologies built into the device. To start with, the company uses a “Roll Motor” drive train, which consists of two motors to retract or extend the screen. It is claimed that pressing or pulling suddenly will not damage the display due to this technology.

The Chinese brand also uses “Two in One Plate” technology to support the display and prevent it from collapsing. Finally, the company uses what is known as “Warp Track” technology just below the area of ​​the moving screen. This is similar to a caterpillar track and provides more resilience as the phone display extends and retracts.

It’s unclear whether the screen has a protective glass or is made of plastic, as we saw with the first Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate foldable leaflets. There’s also no word on whether the brand plans to make this product a commercial reality, but we already know LG is working on its own rollable phone. LG had teased the design back in September, while reports from Korea point to a launch in March 2021.

We asked Oppo for more details on the X 2021’s display and the chances of a commercial release. We will update the article when you get back to us.

AR Glass returns

The company previously teased a redesigned AR Glass headset that looked slimmer than last year’s pair, and we actually looked at that today. The AR Glass 2 headset is slimmer and lighter than the original model. Oppo claims it’s 75% lighter than the previous year’s model.

Thanks to a stereo fisheye camera, a standard RGB camera and a 3D ToF sensor, the redesigned headset continues to offer mixed reality and augmented reality functions. According to Oppo, the headset enables smartphone interactions, gesture-based interactions and spatial localization, as well as 3D spatial localization in milliseconds. In other words, the brand is promoting a more accurate, natural AR experience.

Interestingly, according to Oppo, users can connect an Oppo Find X2 Pro to the headset using a USB-C cable, which increases CPU and GPU performance by up to 40% compared to first-generation glasses. Then what can you actually do with the headset?

Well, the manufacturer says you can watch online and local videos in an AR theater, much like VR headsets. It also touts the ability to overlay some real-world games (e.g., tower defense titles) and AR House furnishings through the JD.com app. According to Oppo, you can also interact with AR Glass from a paired smartphone by simply tapping and swiping the mobile device. In other words, this seems to be similar to HoloLens and other AR headsets.

An AR navigation app?

The final concept announcement on Inno Day 2020 was the CybeReal AR app from Oppo. This offers precise localization and scene recognition as well as digital reconstruction. However, the brand provides the app and technology used for AR enhanced indoor navigation as well as in-store marketing. In fact, the AR enhanced navigation is a bit similar to Google Maps AR navigation feature released last year, as the video above shows.

According to Oppo, the CybeReal AR app uses a combination of GPS, Wi-Fi, network, Bluetooth, cameras, SLAM algorithms, semantic learning and more to get results. “When the user visits new places, he finds his location via CybeReal as soon as he opens the camera,” explains the brand.