A visit to Huawei R&D Campus and some crazy tests with Huawei AI Glasses

Last week, I wrote a post for you describing my first-hand impressions of Huawei AI Glasses. In the article, I describe some special features of the glasses, such as their being waterproof, but then I add that, of course, I couldn’t try them during a store demo. Well, in an expected turn of events, I visited the Huawei Campus, and I tested all these special features in some crazy tests! Keep reading, because this is going to be fun.

Huawei R&D Campus

Huawei is headquartered in Shenzhen, in Southern China. Recently, it has built a new Research and Development campus in DongGuan, which is just outside Shenzhen. This is where my visit to Huawei happened, thanks to my friend Nikk Mitchell, the CEO of FXG. And I have to say it has been one of the most incredible moments of my whole trip to China.

You may think it has been incredible because of the tech I tried: well, also, but the most incredible thing has been the company venue itself! This Huawei Campus is completely insane: it looks like an amusement park more than a company location. It is divided into areas, every area is inspired by a different European city (e.g., Verona in Italy, Paris in France, Granada in Spain), and has the office buildings re-creating the same architectural style of that country. Like… the French area has some buildings that reminded me of Versailles, and there is also a sort of recreation of the Paris train station! I mentioned the train station because there are three train lines that go inside the company (I’m not kidding!) that you can use to move from one area to the other. And every area has its own restaurant and gym.

I’ve made a short YouTube video that shows you some of this awesomeness. It is literally something unique in the world. Please have a look at it and then let me know in the comments if you think it’s crazy, too!

The presentation about the glasses

I didn’t go to the Huawei R&D Campus just to visit some fake Italian locations, though. I went there to have a deeper look at their glasses. I visited a couple of people managing the wearables at Huawei, who showed me all the features of the glasses with a lot of passion.

It was interesting, because while the shopping clerk at the Huawei Store described the glasses as if it was just their job to do that, here I could hear people working on the project every day describing it in a very enthusiastic way. I love hearing people who have a passion for their product, so it was very enjoyable for me.

By the way, sorry if I don’t have videos and photos shot during the presentation, but I couldn’t record anything inside the offices. I will try to describe what I’ve tried with words, hoping that it is enough for you!

The attention to detail in Huawei glasses

During the presentation about the glasses, I could appreciate all the work that goes into the creation of a new product at Huawei. I’m pretty sure this also happens at other major companies, but usually all these details are lost when you don’t speak directly with people who worked on them.

Just a couple of examples. I complained a bit about the design of the glasses not suiting my Western face much. But actually, I’ve been told that design is one of the things that Huawei is most proud of, because they chose that design after analyzing the data of thousands and thousands of faces. I thought they just came out with a design that felt ok, but actually there has been a long study behind that. And again, this is not typical only of Huawei: I remember when Microsoft launched the HoloLens 2, it claimed to have finalized the ergonomics after testing them on thousands of people from different ethnic groups.

Talking about the durability, I’ve already mentioned in my previous post how the Huawei AI glasses have been made in titanium alloy because it guarantees durability while keeping the weight low. But I’ve learned that, for instance, the hinges of the frames have been tested so that they can be opened something like more than ten thousand times without breaking. There is a lot of work behind every detail of a product like this.

Video streaming

One feature I couldn’t test during my Huawei Store hands-on was the video streaming feature. I could test it in the Huawei R&D Center, and I can say it is actually pretty cool. If you’re using WeChat (like… everyone in China), if you are in a video call when using the Huawei glasses, when you select the current camera to use during your call, you can use both the front camera and the back camera of the phone, plus the camera of the glasses. This integration is super useful when you must have those video calls, like when you are traveling, and you want to show your mum what the place you are visiting is like. Or when you are at the supermarket and your special one has to guide you about what products to buy for her. The automatic integration with WeChat was what made it very handy to use: no need to play around with the phone settings, it just worked.

The only problem with video streaming is that it drains the battery a lot more than the other features. So while Huawei glasses can last around 12 hours of mixed use, with a continuous video streaming, the duration is only about 1 hour and 20 minutes. You had better find those items at the supermarket pretty quickly…

Audio privacy features

The Huawei glasses feature a couple of privacy features regarding audio, which are pretty interesting.

One, which I also described in my previous post, is that the glasses have speakers that emit the audio towards your ears, but also have other speakers that emit the “opposite audio” towards the outside. The sum between the audio leaking from the speakers and these opposite waves is going to ideally be zero, so people outside should hear nothing about what you are listening to. In practice, things are not so perfect, so it only works if you keep the audio at a rather low volume. If you’re maxing out the music you are listening to, people around you are going to hear it anyway… at a lower volume than with other glasses, but they still hear you. We tested this feature, and it worked well: if Nikk kept the glasses below a certain volume threshold, and I couldn’t hear the music he was listening to even if I was at 1m distance from him. I think most glasses should implement this feature.

There are also privacy features related to the microphones. Since there are many microphones installed in the glasses, you can interact with them by speaking at a rather low volume. But most importantly, since there is a microphone installed at the center of the glasses, the glasses can understand if a command they hear is coming from your mouth or from somewhere else. So if a friend of yours invokes the “Xiaoyi” assistant, the glasses are not going to answer, because the central microphone is not detecting that command as coming from your mouth. This is pretty cool… and would have helped a lot during the live test of Meta’s Ray-Ban Meta, when a “Hey Meta” said on the stage triggered the assistant on all the glasses in the room, causing a huge crash!

Water resistance

I promised some crazy tests, and I’m keeping my promise. Huawei claims the glasses are waterproof (for sweat and rain) and dustproof. But how to verify those claims?

Well, while we were visiting the “Italian” sector of the venue, Nikk and I noticed a small artificial lake. We started joking about testing the waterproof feature there… until Nikk actually did it! He literally put the glasses underwater multiple times… and once he even did that while recording an underwater video! Look at it here:

I was afraid the glasses could break (they were waterproof, but not in the sense you can drown them), and we would have ended up washing the dishes in one of the restaurants there to repay for the damage… but actually they came out working well as before. Claim tested!

It was funny to see the reaction of the Huawei Wearables manager when he saw the video of our little test… I couldn’t understand well what he said in Chinese, but his facial expression was clearly saying “These fucking crazy foreigners…”, but then he was proud to see the glasses passed the test. As I’ve said, they put a lot of effort into delivering a quality product.

The English-speaking assistant

At the Huawei Store, they told me that the Xiaoyi AI assistant can only speak in Chinese. It is not true, as I was happily able to converse with him in English.

And regarding translation, I tested the translation from Chinese to Italian while listening to the presentation, and it worked okay-ish. There was a visible delay in the translation (the glasses were still translating the content of a slide when the presenter switched to the next one), and some words were still in English, but it kinda worked. It was cool.

The special features of photo and video

Among all the features of these glasses, the thing that seems the coolest to me is Huawei AI Glasses’s capability of shooting high-quality photos and videos.

Here, it is not a matter of resolution. These glasses feature a 12MP camera and can shoot photos up to 4096 × 3072 pixels and videos up to 1920 × 1440 pixels (at 30 fps), which is cool, but it is similar to other glasses. Here, it is a matter of quality and AI enhancement.

First of all, talking about the camera sensor, I’ve been told that Huawei developed a custom one, which offers higher quality and a bigger sensor area. So the hardware has been optimized to take better pictures.

But even more, the AI is doing wonders here. When the glasses take a picture, they are saved in a custom raw format in the glasses, which occupies quite a lot of space (around 30MB). Then, when the photo is transferred to the phone, all this data is used to create the final enhanced picture, so that when it’s in your phone gallery, it appears as good as possible.

Enhancements are about colors, but also about deblurring, stabilization, and other things. For instance, if you shoot a video while walking with these glasses, the output should be stabilized. Here in the video below, I’m actually running, but the video is so stable that it doesn’t look like that…

Nikk and I decided also to run up the stairs with the glasses on like 2 kids at elementary school, making a challenge to verify this claim. And again, the result is pretty cool, as you can see in the video below. Look at how the video shot with the phone by a Huawei employee is very shaky, while the video I shot with the glasses is very fluid:

Another feature is that when you take a picture, and your head is slightly tilted, the glasses will straighten it out, so that it is how you intended it to be. And when you take a picture or video of a train or another moving object, it should come out with as little blurring as possible.

We tested all of this, and it worked fairly well! I also made a video by moving my head as if I were one of those inflatable guys outside the used car shops to see what could be the result… and well, the result was that the people around me looked at me thinking “these fucking crazy foreigners”…

Anyway, it wouldn’t be a SkarredGhost article without some fair criticism, so let me also show you one picture where the stabilization feature did not work. Among the dozens of pictures we have taken, just a few show blur or some other artifacts, so in general, the advertised features work as expected… but sometimes, they do not.

By the way, as you have seen in some pictures here, the glasses have some configurable watermarks that you can add to the pictures you shoot with them. You can put the date, the time, the temperature of that day, etc… There is also a nice feature that in some predefined locations, the glasses can add a special artistic watermark: for instance, if you are in the Forbidden City in Beijing and you shoot a picture with these glasses, you get a special “Forbidden City” watermark in the top left of the picture.

Final impressions

Visiting Huawei R&D headquarters was a very cool experience for me. I’ve seen a magnificent venue, and could appreciate better the effort that is behind the Huawei glasses. And before you raise any suspicion: this article is not sponsored by Huawei, and Huawei didn’t even leave me the glasses to bring home. I just genuinely enjoyed the experience.

After these tests, I have the impression that Huawei AI Glasses may be the best around for what concerns photo and video quality. So if I were looking for smartglasses for photos and videos in China, I would likely buy them. It’s a pity they only work with Huawei phones, for now…

This article was originally published on skarredghost.com