What Display Daily thinks: Probably the best way to make Alt Reality products and sell them is to crowdfund them, letting the over-enthusiastic fanboys bear the burden of initial product runs because who else is going to make that kind of commitment?
Maybe it is a bit too cynical, but a product from a major brand and manufacturer, like TCL, on a crowdfunding platform only speaks to a very narrow user base. Apple probably should have done something similar with the Vision Pro and gotten their billions out that way.
Yeah, that is a bit cynical, but could it be right? Depends on who you are looking to impress. I think a lot of Alt Reality companies are looking at investors and the tailcoats of Apple to carry them through until the market turns in their favor. It’s certainly not product fit, user demand, solutions-oriented design, or an application base clamoring for product.
But, let me put aside that cynicism and skepticism for a while and think about it more objectively. I didn’t personally spend any time on the RayNeo demos at CES or the product because there were plenty of gawkers and determined show attendees wanting to explore the product. The general buzz about smart glasses is favorable on a superficial level, mostly as a next gen tech and, again, hot on the heels of expectations that Apple knows something about the Alt Reality business that no one else knows.
I know that Chris Chinnock has commented on the value of AI in real-time translations, and there is a notion that AR smart glasses and AI processing come together to provide a new means of communicating across language boundaries. There’s also the notion, as pitched here by TCL, for a more effective means of communicating with your AI assistant, like it’s an ethereal ghost buddy. It is going to be interesting to see if we end up with a waste mountain of these devices in the next few years or have to contend with our kids wearing them and tuning you out at the dinner table with a dead eyed star into a virtual world that only they can see. None of it sounds evolutionary or revolutionary. Dammit, I went all cynical again!
The RayNeo X2 and the Optics of Crowdfunding
At CES 2024, TCL announced a global crowdfunding campaign for the RayNeo X2 AR Glasses, set to launch in February 2024. The RayNeo X2 Lite AR Glasses leverage MicroLED optical waveguide display technology, with a 30° field of view through slim, transparent lenses. They are equipped with compact full-color AR glasses projectors on each side of the frame. These glasses also include AI-powered features like real-time translation, live captions, and 3D mapping navigation assistance, along with a 12MP camera for hands-free capture.
The audio experience is triple microphones and high-fidelity speakers with Whisper Mode anti-sound leakage technology. It offers the now cliche spatial computing capabilities, SLAM navigation, face-tracking live translation, and AR gaming. Granted, the RayNeo X2 has already seen some success in China, but it’s plans for a global release on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo in February 2024 that piqued our interest.
The RayNeo X2 Lite is expected to be released in Q3’24, with more details to be announced soon.
