Nreal, the developer that’s best known for the upcoming consumer mixed reality glasses Nreal Light, has left a cursory but mysterious message on its developer page.
And by short, we mean short. If you head on over to developer.nreal.ai, and the page where the company took on pre-orders for a developer edition of the Nreal Light, you’ll be greeted by smiley face emoticon.
Rest assured the rest of the website is active and unscathed, however we’re not quite sure what to make of this development, so Surge reached out to Nreal for an explanation. But instead of putting our suspicions entirely to rest, they added a touch of fuel to the fire.
“We’re in the process of updating the developer page on Nreal’s website as we plan to offer something exciting for developers. We’ll be making an announcement in a couple of weeks,” says an Nreal spokesperson in a statement to Surge.
We asked if this development has anything to do with the consumer version, but the MR company’s spokesperson declined to comment.
If you’re not familiar with Nreal, they’re a mixed reality (MR) hardware and software developer that’s best known for its Nreal Light smart glasses. You can think of mixed reality as an enhanced version of augmented reality that doesn’t just display static information in your field, but projects virtual objects that can actually interact with the physical environment.
With companies like Magic Leap and Microsoft among other reputable mixed reality companies, Nreal is arguably the lone wolf left remaining amid a graveyard of companies that have failed to crack the consumer market, and have pivoted or focused entirely on enterprise customers.
But to assuage concerns, the company has been on a tear since debuting at CES 2019. They’ve inked deal after deal with global 5G carriers including LGUplus, KDDI and Deutsche Telekom to name a few, while enabling USB Type-C compatibility with 5G smartphone partners.
More recently Nreal has introduced software updates like a hand-tracking partnership with Clay AIR, to shore up Nebula, Nreal’s upcoming mixed reality 3D user interface, with more features. Nreal has even opened an optics factory in Wuxi, China to mass produce its vital optical component in-house.
In the meantime, the MR glasses brand has been shoring up the remaining piece of the puzzle – content – ahead of the sale of its highly anticipated consumer version, slated for this Fall. They’ve been supporting and featuring developers who’ve pre-ordered the Nreal Light Developer Kit that are building 3D MR apps or porting 2D native Android apps for Nebula.
