Oppo

Oppo
Information
Industry	Consumer electronics, Augmented Reality
Founded	2004
Founder	Tony Chen (Chen Mingyong)
Headquarters	Dongguan, Guangdong, China
Notable Personnel	Tony Chen (founder and CEO)
Products	Smartphones, smartwatches, audio devices, AR glasses
Parent	BBK Electronics
Website	https://www.oppo.com

Oppo (stylized OPPO, legally OPPO Guangdong Mobile Telecommunications Corp., Ltd.) is a Chinese consumer electronics manufacturer best known for smartphones, and one of the world's largest phone makers. It was founded in 2004 by Tony Chen (Chen Mingyong) and is based in Dongguan, Guangdong, China. The brand grew out of the privately held Chinese conglomerate BBK Electronics, the group long associated with the OnePlus, Vivo, and Realme brands; following a corporate restructuring around 2023, OnePlus and Realme are operated as Oppo subsidiaries. By 2024 the company ranked fourth in the global smartphone market with roughly 8.8 to 9 percent share.

Alongside its core phone business, Oppo has developed a sequence of Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality headsets and Smart glasses since 2019. Most of these have been prototypes or developer-only devices shown at its annual Inno Day conference and at trade shows such as Mobile World Congress (MWC) and the Augmented World Expo (AWE), rather than mass-market consumer products. The lineup spans full standalone AR glasses (AR Glass, 2019), a monocular "assisted reality" display (Air Glass, 2021), binocular assisted-reality glasses (Air Glass 2, 2022), a passthrough mixed reality headset (MR Glass Developer Edition, 2023), and an AI-focused prototype (Air Glass 3, 2024).

History

Oppo registered its brand name in China in 2001 and launched in 2004 under founder Tony Chen, initially making MP3 players and DVD players before moving into smartphones, which became its dominant business. The company grew into one of the largest smartphone vendors worldwide and built out a wider hardware ecosystem of smartwatches, audio products, and tablets.

Oppo's first move into wearable displays came at its inaugural Inno Day conference in Shenzhen on December 10, 2019, where it unveiled a prototype called AR Glass. Described as Oppo's first AR headset, it was a comparatively bulky pair of glasses carrying three cameras (two fisheye lenses and a conventional camera), hand tracking, 3D reconstruction, and 3D spatial audio, and was said to be aimed at a launch in the first quarter of 2020. At the same event Oppo's leadership said the company had "been more than just a phone maker from the outset" and pledged to invest about 7 billion US dollars over three years into research and development across hardware, software, systems, and emerging technologies including augmented reality.

A year later, at Inno Day 2020 on November 17, 2020, Oppo showed a second-generation device, branded AR Glass 2021. It shifted away from the self-contained 2019 design to a lighter "split" form factor that tethers to a smartphone such as the Oppo Find X2 Pro for processing. Oppo said the new model was close to 75 percent lighter than its predecessor and that the company would push for AR content in 2021 through a developer program, an SDK, and a developer competition in China.

In the years that followed, Oppo narrowed its public AR efforts toward lightweight glasses positioned as "assisted reality" rather than full augmented reality, beginning with the original Air Glass in late 2021 and continuing through Air Glass 2 in 2022 and Air Glass 3 in 2024, while also building a separate passthrough mixed reality developer headset in 2023.

Technology

Oppo's glasses have explored several distinct optical approaches across its product line.

For its assisted-reality glasses, Oppo uses diffractive waveguide optics fed by Micro LED light engines. The original Air Glass introduced a self-developed Spark Micro Projector that Oppo described as roughly the size of a coffee bean (about 0.5 cubic centimeters), paired with a Micro LED source rated at very high source brightness and projected through a monocular waveguide lens. Air Glass 2 moved to a binocular layout using Oppo's own resin SRG (surface-relief grating) diffractive waveguide lenses with dual Micro LED displays, and added support for prescription vision correction.

By contrast, Oppo's MR Glass Developer Edition is a video passthrough mixed reality headset built around pancake lenses and the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ platform, with dual front RGB cameras providing a color view of the surroundings. This is the most headset-like device in Oppo's catalog and was aimed at developers on Qualcomm's Snapdragon Spaces platform rather than at consumers.

Oppo's later glasses have leaned on artificial intelligence. The Air Glass 3 prototype integrates AndesGPT, Oppo's own large language model, to power a voice assistant for tasks such as information searches and travel planning, controlled by voice commands and touch gestures.

Products

The table below lists Oppo's publicly announced XR hardware. With the exception of the first-generation Air Glass, which had a limited regional sale, most of these devices were prototypes, concepts, or developer-only kits.

Product	Announced	Type	Notable specs and notes
AR Glass	December 2019	Standalone AR glasses (prototype)	Oppo's first AR headset; three cameras (two fisheye plus one conventional), hand tracking, 3D reconstruction, 3D spatial audio; targeted Q1 2020
AR Glass 2021	November 2020	Tethered AR glasses (prototype)	"Split" design tethering to a smartphone (e.g. Oppo Find X2 Pro); about 75% lighter than the 2019 model; SLAM tracking; content push planned for 2021
Air Glass	December 14, 2021	Monocular assisted-reality display	~30 g; self-developed Spark Micro Projector with Micro LED and monocular diffractive waveguide; up to ~1400 nits average brightness; Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 4100; cicada-wing design; pairs with OPPO Watch 2; sold in mainland China from Q1 2022
Air Glass 2	December 2022	Binocular assisted-reality glasses (concept)	~38 g; resin SRG diffractive waveguide; dual Micro LED displays at up to 1000 nits per eye; vision-correction support; features include calls, navigation, real-time translation, and voice-to-text; not commercially released
MR Glass Developer Edition	May 31, 2023 (AWE 2023)	Passthrough mixed reality headset (developer)	Snapdragon XR2+; pancake lenses; 2160x2160 per eye at 120Hz; binocular video passthrough with dual front RGB cameras; 33W SUPERVOOC charging; distributed in China via EnlightXR in H2 2023 as a Snapdragon Spaces kit
Air Glass 3	February 2024 (MWC 2024)	AI assisted-reality glasses (prototype)	~50 g; Micro LED with resin waveguide; up to 1000 nits with auto brightness; four microphones; AndesGPT AI voice assistant; tethers to an Oppo smartphone; prototype limited to China

Market position

Oppo is one of the dominant global smartphone vendors, but in XR it has remained an experimental player rather than a volume seller. Its glasses have repeatedly drawn attention at industry events, yet several models, including AR Glass 2021, Air Glass 2, and Air Glass 3, were never sold to the general public, and the original Air Glass reached only the Chinese market. Coverage of the Air Glass 3 noted that, as a prototype, it was unclear whether Oppo would commercialize the design, and observers framed the device as part of a broader rush by phone makers to attach AI assistants to wearable glasses. Oppo has also supported third-party headsets through its phones: several of its devices, including Oppo Reno models, were certified to drive the Nreal Light (see Nreal Light, the early headset from the company now known as Xreal).