Smart glasses/AR/VR connectivity solutions
Smart glasses leg
The charging base provides charging functionality for open headphones. Product composition: plastic casing + POGOPIN + magnet + PCBA + cable
Currently, mainstream smart glasses, AR, and VR devices primarily offer four types of connectivity solutions: Bluetooth, wireless networking, USB-C wired, and DisplayPort wired. These three devices differ significantly in their connectivity solutions. Simply put:
Smart glasses: primarily wireless, with a core connection via Bluetooth to handle lightweight tasks such as notifications, audio, and AI voice assistants.
AR glasses: Pros and cons coexist, more commonly used as screens, primarily connecting phones or computers via USB-C cables for high picture quality, with Bluetooth generally supported as an additional feature.
VR headsets: wired and wireless coexist, with distinctly different goals. High-end PCVR aims for ultimate picture quality and requires a wired connection via DisplayPort; in contrast, all-in-one devices can be streamed via Wi-Fi or USB-C in exchange for mobility.
Now let's take a detailed look at their respective characteristics and primary applications.
👓 Smart Glasses and AI Glasses: A Great Companion for Your Phone
These glasses typically integrate cameras, headphones, and AI assistants to free up hands, so the connection solution is primarily wireless, emphasizing a seamless and convenient interactive experience.
Bluetooth: Lowest overhead, least core. Most products come standard with Bluetooth 5.3 or later for connecting phones, enabling answering calls, playing music, receiving notifications, voice-waking AI assistants, and simple data transfer.
Wireless network (Wi-Fi): used for high-speed transmission. Used for high-speed transmission of just-shot photos or videos to mobile phones while accessing more complex AI services through large-scale networking.
USB-C (wired): primarily used for charging. Almost all products use USB-C as a charging port, and some models also support data transfer or firmware upgrades via USB-C wired connections.
Emerging IoT Connectivity Technologies (Bluetooth Mesh & NearLink): Making glasses the entry point for the Internet of Things (IoT), allowing direct connection and control of smart homes without the need for a mobile phone transit.
🕶️ AR Glasses: Portable Large Screen
AR glasses primarily aim to overlay virtual images onto the real world, providing a portable giant screen experience. Therefore, its core connectivity solution needs to ensure high-quality, low-latency video streams.
USB-C wired connection (DisplayPort Alt Mode): the most mainstream core solution. Connect directly to a phone, computer, or gaming handheld device via a USB-C cable and transmit high-resolution, high-refresh-rate images using its DP (DisplayPort) video transmission protocol. For example, products like XREAL 1S use this model.
Wireless Connection (Wi-Fi & Bluetooth): As an auxiliary solution. Bluetooth is paired with peripherals such as controllers and headphones, while Wi-Fi is used for networking or wireless data synchronization with computing units (like Rokid AR Spatial's "computing box").
🥽 VR headset: Two Paths to Immersive Experience
VR headsets emphasize a fully immersive virtual world, with the connection method directly determining the quality of visual and interactive experiences. There are mainly two technical approaches:
High-end Choice: Wired Direct Connection
Designed specifically for PC VR gaming experiences pursuing ultimate picture quality and low latency, the headset is directly connected to a high-performance computer via cable, allowing images to be transmitted without compression or lossless transmission.
DisplayPort (DP): A benchmark for picture quality, currently the gold standard for high-end PCVR. It directly outputs uncompressed video signals from the graphics card, achieving the lowest latency and sharpest picture quality.
USB-C (DisplayPort Alt Mode): Versatile and versatile, with some headsets (such as the Meta Quest series) supporting wired streaming via USB-C connection to a computer, which is convenient but comes with some loss of image compression.
Free Choice: Wireless Streaming
The core lies in breaking free from cable constraints. The headset sends user commands to the computer via Wi-Fi (5GHz/6GHz bands), renders the image, compresses it, and transmits it back over the network, where the headset decodes and displays it.
Protocol: Mainstream wireless streaming solutions include Meta's official Air Link, third-party software Virtual Desktop, and Valve's official Steam Link.
Image quality: Wireless streaming relies on video compression technology, which inevitably results in a loss of image quality and may introduce additional latency when the network environment is poor.
Improvement: The future trend is to integrate eye-tracking technology with foveated streaming, transmitting high-quality images only at the user's focal point to balance picture quality with bandwidth pressure.
Simplified: Some VR headsets opt to transmit signals via a dedicated wireless USB adapter connected to a PC, bypassing complex home network settings to provide a more stable and instant wireless VR experience.
