Lenovo’s sleek new AR glasses project 5 virtual monitors at once

Lenovo released its new pair of sleek and lightweight AR glasses called the Thinkreality A3 today. The glasses can connect to your PC or a Motorola phone through a USB-C cable — but sadly, it’s still just for enterprise customers.

The headset is powered by Qualcomm’s XR1 mixed-reality platform. It has 1080p stereoscopic displays for each eye lens. It has dual fish-eye cameras to track and map the room around you. Plus, an 8-megapixel 1080p camera that sits right above your nose tip, to stream your view to remote teams.

Lenovo says that you can fold these glasses up like any sunglasses and sneak them into your bag. It’ll supply a carrying case with the device too.

There are two editions of these glasses. The PC edition plugs into your system and it’s designed to provide a virtual monitor experience; you can line up five of them. It can display your existing applications on these large virtual monitors without taking up physical space.

This seems like a great fit for professionals working from home and don’t have space for extra monitors. But the A3 won’t come cheap and that means freelancers or creative folks might not be able to use one just yet.

There’s also an Industrial Edition that lets you tether the headset to select Motorola phones and lets you perform your tasks in AR. This will enable folks who work on a factory floor or a manufacturing line to take a look at a large number of operations while being in place. Plus, you could add extra lenses on the front for eye protection.

Lenovo faces competition from other players such as Microsoft and Google in the enterprise market. However, it believes that right now it’s a good time to stick around this market and not to switch over to the consumer side.

Nathan Pettyjohn, commercial lead for AR and VR at the company, said that we’ll see AR being integrated into work in the next few years:

In the next three to five years, we’ll see the ability to use augmented reality anywhere and everywhere at work will grow exponentially. Plus, powerful chipsets and 5G rollout will allow us to create more use cases out of this technology.

The company is planning to ship this product by mid-2021. We don’t know the pricing details of the ThinkReality A3 as of now, but given the A6 was priced above $2,000, the new device won’t come cheap.