Recently, Lei's friend bought a new 75-inch TV, initially full of anticipation, but soon felt regret due to a series of issues.
The causes of these problems are not uncommon.
The inherent difficulty in transporting and installing large TVs, coupled with the varying skills of installation technicians, leads to numerous issues. Furthermore, from remote control operation to fixed viewing position, the use experience of large TVs does not align with the current media consumption habits of young people.
In summary, large TVs appear too cumbersome in terms of weight and usage. People are accustomed to more relaxed, anytime, anywhere media enjoyment, and the TV industry is aware of this, continuously exploring more possibilities for large screen usage. For example, adding a mobile stand to make the TV a "mobile TV," or launching a "vertical TV" that supports watching short videos in rotation. Additionally, projectors and laser TVs are also exploration directions for the development of large screens.
Fairly speaking, these explorations have certain value but still fail to completely solve the core issues of the large screen experience.
In this context, a summit held by Google provided new ideas, suggesting that "AR+TV" may be the true future of the large screen experience.
From October 14th to 15th, the Google APAC TV Summit 2024 was grandly held in Bangkok. At the conference, Google discussed the "new form of future Android TV" and unveiled the world's first AR Android TV in collaboration with Rokid — the Rokid Station global edition, considered as one of the best carriers of Google's evolving ecosystem.
Lei was not surprised by this. Lei had previously experienced Rokid AR Lite deeply and found it fully meets the needs for large-screen viewing or gaming, with better portability and interaction experience than traditional large-screen devices, showing potential to address traditional large screen pain points and likely leading the transformation of "future TV."
In July this year, Rokid AR Lite sold over 10,000 units within 12 hours of release, attracting nearly 300,000 users, and the monthly active rate of Rokid AR users reached 75%, to some extent demonstrating the development potential of "AR+TV."
This globally watched "new TV" heralds a new future.
As an annual event in the global television and entertainment technology field, seeing the participation of the well-known AR glasses company Rokid at the Google APAC TV Summit was expected yet pleasantly surprising.
The surprise lies in: Rokid has always been committed to reshaping entertainment through AR technology and enjoys great attention at this global summit as an innovative category leader with official endorsement from Google.
Without a doubt, the core key lies in the new paradigm brought by Rokid. As the world's first Google-certified Android TV device, Rokid Station Global Edition has a compact design, smaller than many flagship phones, and can easily fit in your pocket for use anytime, anywhere. When connected to Rokid AR glasses, you can project a virtual screen of up to 300 inches with just the lightweight glasses. This performance easily surpasses any household large-screen device, comparable to an IMAX giant screen. More importantly, the Rokid Station Global Edition transforms the 300-inch giant screen into an extremely portable experience, combining AR technology to thoroughly resolve the traditional TV's contradiction between large screens and portability. Rokid, in collaboration with Google, employs cutting-edge AR technology to create a new television development paradigm— a future free from the constraints of physical screen sizes, allowing the demand for large-screen entertainment to be met anytime. AR+TV is not only a technological breakthrough but will also foster new business models. When AR and TV intersect, not only do users have more flexible viewing, but content creators, streaming platforms, and advertisers can also expand the scenarios and times for content consumption, offering personalized real-time recommendations. AR+TV breaks through the limitations of advertising, creating a more interactive and immersive ad experience for users. While watching videos, users can interact with AR ads and even truly experience products in 3D virtual merchandise, greatly increasing the appeal and conversion rates of advertising. Thus, at the Google APAC TV Summit, Rokid became one of the main focal points, attracting many industry professionals to explore and experience it.
Upgrade TV, focusing more on upscale large-screen experience. Upgrading to a 300-inch virtual large screen brings an evident improvement to the viewing experience. Consumers' demand for larger screens has always been driving the development of display devices. A report by Ovi Cloud Network indicates that large screens are a trend in the TV industry. Although TV shipments are declining, 75-inch TVs led sales during the 618 shopping festival, and the market share of 100-inch TVs has doubled. However, even so, traditional large-screen devices still have spatial and portability limitations, making it challenging to meet today’s users' flexible large-screen needs. Issues of cost and viewing conditions due to screen enlargement, as well as a single interaction mode, appear highly limited compared to the portability and immersive experience offered by AR+TV.
"In the past, we pursued larger sizes, richer colors, and higher resolution television experiences, hence the increasingly bigger size of TVs."
The founder and CEO of Rokid stated in his speech on-site, "Now, Rokid through AI+AR capability provides people with a small-sized, large-screen, portable TV experience."
As a company that prioritizes technological innovation and user experience, Rokid deeply understands the contradiction between consumers' growing demand for large-screen entertainment and the traditional TV development paradigm, and also sees that with the iteration and breakthrough of AR technology, AR+TV can create an unprecedented portable TV experience.
On the global version of Rokid Station, you can see that AR+TV is not just about the simple enlargement of screen size, but a fundamental change in experience. Traditional TVs are confined to the living room, while the global version of Rokid Station allows users to enjoy a large-screen experience anywhere.
Whether at home, in an office environment, or on a journey, you can enjoy a visual feast with a 300-inch virtual giant screen by simply wearing AR glasses, no longer limited to a fixed physical space, you can play games on the grassland or immerse yourself in watching movies on a high-speed train.
In addition, the global version of Rokid Station deeply integrates Google's content ecosystem, supporting streaming platforms like YouTube, Hulu, Disney+, covering over 10,000 video applications, and giving users access to over 700,000 video works. Its personalized recommendation system integrates data from different terminals to intelligently recommend content based on user preferences.
In Conclusion
Since the advent of television in 1925, over 99 years, humanity's entertainment experiences and lifestyles have undergone tremendous changes. Modern users pursue not only the sense of immersion brought by larger screens but also the portability to use them anytime and anywhere, which traditional TVs cannot satisfy.
With the emergence of the new "AR+TV" paradigm, not only has it redefined the user's entertainment experience, but through the empowerment of AR technology, users can enjoy the visual impact of a 300-inch giant screen anytime, anywhere, all with just a portable AR glasses set. This new way of entertainment breaks the physical limitations of a large screen, overcoming the constraints of fixed spaces, making AR+TV likely to gradually replace traditional TVs and become the mainstream large-screen entertainment method of the future—the "Future TV".
In China, Rokid has initiated the mobile large-screen wave with its AR Lite product, with more and more users experiencing the superiority of this mobile large screen in different scenarios. This is evidently a digital revolution, and in this revolution, Rokid plays a crucial role. The company not only provides world-leading AR technology and an excellent hardware platform but also, through exclusive cooperation with Google, promotes the construction of AR+TV content and ecosystems, benefiting both the TV and AR industries.
Of course, this is also what Rokid consistently does, using AR technology to create a more flexible, multi-scenario, and immersive entertainment world, completely reshaping the future of digital entertainment.
