Hands-on: Bear Sunny transition lenses for AR glasses

During my first day at VR AR Expo China, I tried various interesting pieces of hardware. The first one that I’m going to describe to you today is the Bear Sunny transition lenses for AR glasses!

[A little disclaimer: the organizers of the VR AR Expo China paid for my accommodation in Shanghai for the event]

Bear Sunny transition lenses

Bear Sunny is a Chinese startup (based in Suzhou, close to Shanghai) that produces transition lenses for AR glasses. They do not make their own AR glasses, but they produce this lens component that AR glasses manufacturers may be interested in employing in their products.

The idea behind Bear Sunny technology is the following: when you are indoors, current AR glasses are fine to use, but when you are outdoors, the light is too bright for you to see the content. If the lenses could get more transparent when you are indoors, or anyway in dimmer lighting conditions, and darker (like with sunglasses) when you are in brighter lighting conditions, that would be perfect to have AR glasses that could be used in every moment of your day.

This is exactly what they showcased to me: Lionel, the Bear Sunny employee who was at the booth, showed me how their lenses could get the desired opacity. He was using a smartphone app to set the transparency levels to 100%, 80%, 30%, 10%, and I could see the lens gradually get darker. They also had some prototype glasses made by them that I could wear, and pressing a dedicated button, I could cycle through some preset levels of opacity.

I asked Lionel if Bear Sunny is already collaborating with some companies doing AR glasses, and he mentioned a lot of names: he said there were some experiments made related to the Xiaomi glasses, and then in the list of partners he mentioned all tech and glasses companies: Meta, EssilorLuxottica, Google, Huawei, etc… I doubt they are working with all these brands, but it is possible that many of the companies making glasses are aware of this startup and may consider integrating its solution in the future.

Reflections and considerations

I think the technology offered by Bear Sunny is for sure interesting: the fact that you can electronically change the opacity of the lenses of AR glasses according to your needs is great. It can be useful for AR glasses to let you enjoy content both indoors and outdoors, but it can also be something employed in the future by hybrid glasses that could darken their lenses to be VR and make them more transparent to be AR. And I can testify that it worked: by just pressing some triggers, the lenses could transition to the opacity that you desired.

I still have some doubts about the actual integration with AR glasses for outdoor usage, though. It’s clear that the technology alone works, but how difficult is it to integrate with existing lighting engines like waveguides? I tried to ask this question to the Udexreal employees, but, being my translator a non-technical person, she was not able to properly translate what I was saying. Another doubt that I have is about if the technology is good enough to let you see AR augmentations when outdoors. I was able to try the lenses only indoors, in the expo venue. But we all know that the sun has a luminance power that is far superior to the lights that there could be on an expo floor, so I can not report on how these lenses were effective in blocking the sun light, nor on how they were good to let me properly see the AR elements while instead blocking only the outside light. Furthermore, it is not clear to me what maximum transparency these lenses can have, so if, for instance, they can ever be fully transparent or there is a baseline level of opacity.

I can confirm that the technology is interesting and currently works, but I would like to see it applied to fully-fledged AR glasses and tried outdoors, before expressing a definitive opinion about it.

Further references

Bear Sunny is for sure an interesting Chinese startup that provides a solution that may be interesting for AR glasses manufacturers. If you want to know more about them, you can go to their website or ask me for an introduction.

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