Nreal Dodges Disruption, Will Release AR Smartglasses This Fall With Telco Partners

Nreal, the Chinese company behind the Light Smartglasses, has opened a new optics factory in Wuxi City, Jiangsu Province, China, that can produce as many as one million units a year by the end of 2020. As a result, the company says it will make up for any lost time and have ample supply for worldwide release in the fall. The coronoacrisis caused some slowdowns of the Nreal developer kit, but those have reportedly been resolved. 

Founded by thirty six year old engineer, CEO Chi Xu, in 2017, Nreal’s Light branded smartglasses are sleek, smartphone-based spatial XR headset. The highly anticipated $499 HMD attracted big crowds at CES in January, 2020. We met with Chi at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, 2020, and he acknowledged that there isn’t much spatial content yet, but he showed us Nreal’s approach to bringing the 2D content on a smartphone into a spatial context. Users can place multiple screens around them, In addition, Nreal will feature Spatial.io’s collaboration platform for remote teams. Nreal is Android only for now, unless Apple agrees to cooperate with the fledgling company. The glasses are also  prescription compatible. 

“Essentially we’re scaling production with this new factory and R&D facility to which Nreal has committed $200M,” said Chi, “This will give us the capability to manufacture display components (up to 1M pieces by end of 2020) for other potential customers that are interested in this technology — similar to Samsung or LG providing their tech to companies like Apple.”

“Our display and image quality is a point of pride for Nreal and one of the more prominent features praised by developers and users of Nreal Light today,” said Bing Xiao, cofounder of Nreal and Chief Optical Scientist. “Today is a key milestone for us because opening a new optics factory in a city like Wuxi, China enables us to flexibly scale our production capacity and personally oversee the production of this key component. This means that we’re not only able to meet the compounding demand for the highest quality displays when we ship Nreal Light, but we’re also even considering expanding the demand to prospective partners interested in this technology.”

“We’re back at full speed and it hasn’t cost us time,” said. Chi. “We have strict deadlines with our release partners Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, Japan’s KDDI, and South Korea’s LG Uplus, and our new capacity ensures we’re going to be ready.” For the major telcos, Nreal present a unique opportunity to show off the benefits of the faster 5G networks now coming on line. 

No word on who will be Nreal’s release partner in the US.