Nreal, Beijing-based manufacturer of ready-to-wear mixed reality glasses and 3D system Nebula, announced the launch of high-fidelity hand tracking powered by Clay AIR to support optical hand controls in conjunction with expanded carrier partnerships with Deutsche Telekom. Ahead of the sales of the consumer version of Nreal Light, Nreal introduces an extra dimension of convenience through hand tracking in partnership with Clay.
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In pursuit of frictionless user experience, high-fidelity hand tracking on Nreal Light is an intuitive way for users to manipulate or interact with their MR environment using their very own hands to pinch, grab and swipe holographic objects.
Best of all, hand tracking works by using Nreal Light’s embedded spatial cameras to overlay a 3D hand skeleton model in full HD on top of the physical hand. Real-time changes of the fingers and hands are tracked and rendered using state of the art deep learning algorithms. As an added benefit, the battery life on the Nreal Light tethered to an XR optimized 5G-enabled smartphone that’s powered by Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 865 or 855 Mobile Platform, not only supports power consumption, but also smoothly renders and runs overlaid hand tracking graphics.
“By offering hand tracking with Clay AIR, Nreal offers its developers and users of the Nreal Light Consumer Kit an added degree of flexibility in how they might want to interact with their MR environment, whether it’s hand tracking, their XR-optimized 5G smartphone as a controller, a third-party 6DoF controller, or even in the near future eye tracking in partnership with 7invensun,” said Chi Xu, CEO and founder of Nreal. “In fact, we don’t believe that there’s a single best way to interact with MR, and in fact could be a combination of control options at once, but we want to offer developers and users the choice to decide what’s best for them.”
With hand tracking in high demand among the 3,500 developers building on Nreal Light, the feature will be made available through the Nreal SDK in the near future and can be deployed onto apps including native Android apps that can run on Nreal’s 3D system.
“Clay AIR is proud to participate in the revolution Nreal is triggering. They are a leader in consumer AR and we are looking forward to continuously innovating and creating an industry platform with them,” said Varag Gharibjanian, CRO of Clay AIR.
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Thomas Amilien, CEO of Clay AIR said:
“Consumer-friendly hardware, powered by seamless hand tracking and gesture recognition technology, is a necessary catalyst to make AR accessible and practical on a global scale. This partnership marks an inflection point with the first integration of hand tracking via embedded monochrome cameras already used for spatial tracking in AR.”
Expansion of EU Carrier Partnerships
Further expanding its carrier network of partners in Europe ahead of the availability of the Nreal Light Consumer Kit and one step closer to delivering MR to mass consumers, Nreal follows its collaboration with EE in the United Kingdom to announce its partnership with Deutsche Telekom (DT). The partnership between DT and Nreal will aim to fully leverage 5G technology in Germany and other European markets on an MR ecosystem by e.g. improving work-place efficiencies for businesses and enterprises like remote team collaboration or Field Support, while also introducing innovative MR services and contents to consumers.
“At Deutsche Telekom we strongly believe that mixed reality and spatial computing will soon transform our lives” says Omar Tazi, SVP Product Innovation and Customer Experience at Deutsche Telekom. “Nreal has made a big step towards bringing these technologies to mass market with fantastic glasses and very intuitive experiences. Deutsche Telekom together with Nreal will unleash the full potential of mixed reality to demonstrate the unlimited potential that 5G can offer to both consumers and professionals. Deutsche Telekom will be contributing critical network technologies, from edge computing to 5G to best home connectivity and combining it with great content such as music, concerts, sports events as well as gaming.”
Spatial Partnership Adds MR app to Nebula
Spatial’s workplace collaboration MR app will debut on the Nreal Light platform through Nebula, offering users a mobile remote presence solution that isn’t limited by the physical space. Users can simply put on a pair of Nreal Light glasses, tethered to a Snapdragon-powered 5G smartphone, and run the Spatial app to experience the first 5G optimized collaborative meeting solution for an MR platform.
Nreal is also in partnership with Datamesh to explore more MR work space solutions on Nreal Light.
