36 Krypton learned that on August 3, Xiaomi released Xiaomi ecological chain's first smart glasses products " Mijia glasses camera " open crowdfunding, this product by the Xiaomi ecological chain company " honeycomb technology " research and development.

The man behind this product is Xia Yongfeng, the former vice president of Xiaomi ecological chain and general manager of Xiaomi's cell phone department. This budding entrepreneur, career experience is quite legendary. With a professional background in science and engineering, his first career after graduation was as a journalist, and his dream was to become "the best journalist in the TMT field".

After joining Xiaomi in 2013, Xia Yongfeng manipulated a number of explosive products such as Xiaomi bracelet and Mijia sweeping robot. After participating in the completion of Xiaomi 10Ultra, the last product in Xiaomi in 2020, he left to start his own business and made a hardware category that few people have done - smart glasses camera.

" big factory high P" venture, naturally got the capital chase. Within two years, Honeycomb Technology completed three rounds of financing: in May 2021, it completed an angel round of financing from Xiaomi Group and Shunwei Capital, becoming a Xiaomi ecological chain company; three months later, it completed a Pre-A round of financing led by Qiming Venture Capital.

Even in this year's capital winter, Honeycomb Technology completed another 300 million yuan Series A financing led by Tencent and Zongyuan Capital in March. This is also the first AR smart glasses company from Tencent, which has always been very cautious about hardware investment.

This time, Xia Yongfeng tries to answer the question, after the growth of cell phones faces the ceiling, what is the next generation of portable smart hardware? This is also a key question that has been lingering in the smart hardware industry in recent years.

Since 2021, Facebook has renamed Meta and rekindled the enthusiasm for AR and meta-universe entrepreneurship in China. The answer to the question is already clear.

In Xia Yongfeng's view, in the process of developing human smart hardware from PC to cell phone, the hand has acted as the interaction hub for information exchange with the outside world. However, the real information collection and exchange of human beings is based on the head. AR as the representative of the head wear device, is the next generation of the reasonable form of portable hardware.

" The future carry-on intelligent terminal will shift from the hand to the head, which is what will happen in my lifetime", Xia Yongfeng said. But to make AR glasses really go To C has proven not to be a simple thing in these years.

Honeycomb technology glasses camera
AR glasses have three big technical mountains

The biggest constraint across the AR glasses to C-end users is that the current near-eye display technology is still difficult to get the optimal solution in the parameters of field view, thinness, cost and brightness.

Currently, there are three main near-eye display solutions used in the AR glasses industry: optical prism, Birdbath and optical waveguide. The three solutions have their advantages and disadvantages - optical prism technology is more mature and can provide the highest brightness of the three, but the field of view (FOV) there are limitations, that is, the user can see through the glasses field of view is small.

Birdbath and optical waveguide solutions even with a larger field of view, but the former requires a thicker optical module, making the glasses become larger and heavier; and the optical waveguide solution that allows the glasses to " thin ", the current yield is not high, can not achieve mass production, the cost is also very high. This is also the reason why most of the AR glasses using light waveguide technology are either overpriced, or simply have limited availability and are hard to find.

In addition, the latter two display solutions share the problem of insufficient brightness, which also leads to most AR glasses are difficult to use in the brighter outdoor, only confined to indoor. Or there are glasses manufacturers can only use green monochrome display in order to maintain the brightness.

Therefore, in order to take into account the mass production, cost and brightness, Mijia this glasses display solution on the choice of free-form optical prism program. The company's main goal is to provide a solution to the problem of the problem.

The AR eyewear is also a barrier to the chip and positioning technology. Whether it is a split or an all-in-one machine, the industry needs to consider how to bring down the price of the chip; in addition, AR glasses need to have the ability to detect the outside world. 6DoF technology and Slam technology are mature, but how to achieve lower power consumption and higher accuracy on AR is still difficult.

AR toC's alternative attempt: glasses camera

Putting aside all the technical barriers, another problem of AR glasses to the public is that the industry players have not yet answered the question of "why use" to the public.

Currently on the market, AR glasses have limited application scenarios, commonly used scenarios include real-time navigation, real-time translation, notification display, movie watching and so on. However, these " weak functions " experience is not excellent, it is easy to be replaced by cell phones.

How can AR glasses be used more frequently by users? Xia Yongfeng's answer is to shoot.

In foreign countries, there are already companies that have made similar attempts. 2016, Snap Inc. launched Spectacles glasses that focus on photography, and in 2021, Meta Inc. also launched Ray-Ban Stories with two camera modules.

However, the Mijia camera glasses go a step further, in addition to taking pictures, users can also see what is being shot in real time. The camera is equipped with a camera on the left side (50MP wide-angle camera + OIS optical stabilization 8MP periscopic telephoto camera), which allows users to achieve a 5x optical zoom and 15x hybrid zoom. The user can also see objects up to 100 meters away through a small prism in front of the right eye.

Taking pictures is simple. There is a small touch module on the right side of the glasses frame, swipe back and forth that is the zoom, click is taking pictures, a single finger swipe down to switch between photo and video mode.

In order to make this glasses camera more " like " camera, this product also made an interesting photo function " time back " - if the user is too slow to press " shutter " and miss the beautiful moment, glasses will automatically record the shutter before the ten seconds of video footage.

Photos are a social tool, and instant sharing and social communication are crucial. This is also the biggest hidden selling point of Snapchat and Meta's two previously launched glasses cameras - the photos taken by users are highly recognizable with a slightly "distorted" round shape and can be quickly transmitted to their respective backing social platforms.

Similarly, on the Mijia product, in order to provide a better streaming experience, users can see the material taken on the Mijia Glasses APP and support one-click sharing to social media platforms.

In addition to the function of taking photos, these glasses also have a built-in " Xiao Ai translation", which provides real-time English-Chinese translation, and the overseas version will support translation in more than 6 languages. In addition, this product will also continue OTA in September this year, adding new ways to play, such as " botanical garden and zoo ", casting screen and so on.

Real-time translation
Before landing, find the core users first

It seems that the first smart glasses product of Xiaomi ecological chain, a foot across the field of the new form of camera.

With the traditional SLR camera shipments being squeezed by cell phones, the new form of camera has found a breakthrough from it. Some industry sources revealed that the sales of DJI Pocket 2 in China last year was about 1 million, and it is growing at a rate of 50% every year.

The core reason for the growth rate of new form camera is scene innovation. Xia Yongfeng said, as before Leica's success, because it made a huge camera into a movable camera, so that users can take pictures in more scenes. And now the traditional SLR camera shipments down, new forms of cameras up, is also a continuation of this thinking.

In contrast, the problem with traditional head-mounted cameras is that there is a deviation between what the eye sees and what is really shot - the camera is worn on the head, and the person photographed may become a " little giant ", and worn on the neck, it may be photographed as a " dwarf ".

The glasses camera is parallel to the human eye, the content of the shot is more realistic, " what you see is what you get ". Therefore, the future of this glasses camera for the people and scenarios are obvious, such as the need to shoot the first view of the up main, concert / various ball game audience, camping, travel and so on.

In Xia Yongfeng's view, the development of any hardware product follows the same path: when it was first born, the market was chaotic, there were many manufacturers in the industry, and the users were niche, this stage is in line with the "happy cake" theory, the industry together to make the cake bigger.

At the second stage, the strength of the company gradually began to appear stratification, the rapid expansion of users; to the third stage of the oligarchic era, the industry entered the era of zero-sum game, user growth stagnated, who grabbed one more customer, the other one will be a customer less.

AR glasses gradually towards to C will also be this path. But in the core of the optical machine, chip, positioning three technical mountains have not been pushed down, the major manufacturers can do, only to take the first step to explore, to find their own core customer base.

For the future, Xia Yongfeng also considered very clearly, " find their own early niche, and then gradually migrate to the early mass users ", before that, " first to take pictures of this selling point well ".

Reference reading:

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