What They Say
Nio, a Chinese electric car start-up is developing custom AR glasses, made by Nreal for use in its vehicles. The company also said that it has developed VR glasses with Nolo, another Chinese start-up. Both XR suppliers have investment from Nio Capital, the firm’s investment arm.
The car will cost around $50K and the glasses will not be standard, but an extra cost option. Nio has a store in Oslo and plans to expand in five other European countries next year.
The firm said that the Nreal display is equivalent to a 201″ diagonal image viewed at 6m and with 49ppd and 90hz refresh. The idea is that users that want information can get it while others rest or sleep. The Nolo glasses are for VR and have binocular ‘4k’ displays, and pancake lenses. The headset has 6DOF SLAM and ultra low latency. There will be special apps developed for the VR glasses.
The car also has a 10.2″ HDR instrument cluster and a 12.8″ AMOLED centre cluster with 1728 x 1888 resolution.
Separately, Nvidia said that the ET5 is powered by the NIO Adam supercomputer, built on four Nvidia Drive Orin SoCs. The range of the car is said to be 620 miles with the maximum sized battery.
There is a Chinese language video of the launch (with sub-titles) here. (the sub-titles are legible at double speed and the display information is around 12:30 into the video)
The firm is reported to have made over 80K vehicles in the year to the end of November 2021.
What We Think
I can’t say that I’m convinced by the gimmick of AR & VR glasses options. Still, it does make sense just to put light where the users’ eyes are rather than everywhere! However, especially for the VR headsets I find it hard to imagine that they could be used unless the vehicle is stationary. The conflict between actual and virtual motion would seem guaranteed to cause sickness! (BR)
