Lenovo is set to hold their own press conference in San Francisco on Thursday, dubbed “Lenovo Tech World”. We don’t know a whole lot about this event, but we do know that Lenovo’s Project Tango smartphone will be debuting. We are also expecting to see the Moto Z as well as a North American announcement for the Moto G4 family. Now it appears that Lenovo may be announcing some “next generation” AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) products at the event later this week. According to a press release sent out by Movidius, Lenovo is making a series of these products, in partnership with the company, with the first to be released in the second half of 2016. Movidius has said that this is a dedicated mobile VR device and is not a smartphone at all. Leading us to the conclusion that this is not the Project Tango device, but another device altogether.
The Myriad 2 is the chip from Movidius that Lenovo is supposedly using in this device. The chip is optimized for computer vision, and is actually already in use by the DJI Phantom 4 drone. The Myriad 2 could also be used for positional tracking in mobile headsets. This would be a big deal for virtual reality headsets, as you can imagine. This would give the headset the ability to know where you are moving and as well as where you are walking. Making virtual reality a bit more immersive. This kind of tracking isn’t available in Google’s Daydream platform nor Samsung’s Gear VR. It is available on the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, but using external sensors.
Movidius CEO, Remi El-Ouazzane, said in a prepared statement that “our technology was built to maximize machine vision performance in a sub-1 Watt power budget. In selecting Myriad 2 for their VR products, Lenovo is building devices design from the ground-up for VR.” Virtual reality has been a popular topic in the last couple of years. With just about everyone making their own virtual reality viewer, and it looks like Lenovo is looking to jump in the VR game as well. Movidius’ press release does say that we should expect more details on Lenovo’s products at their Tech World event on June 9th in San Francisco. However, we may only see one product, as Movidius did say that there is one slated for a second half of 2016 release, and didn’t mention a time-frame on the other products.