Hey r/augmentedreality,

We’re the team behind Nimbo X1, and we’re here for the AMA we promised.

First, some good news: Nimbo X1 is officially funded on Kickstarter.

A huge thank you to everyone who backed us, followed the project, asked tough questions, or sent us feedback along the way. We really appreciate it.

For anyone new here: Nimbo X1 is a 49g pair of full-color AR glasses built around our 0.7mm single-layer SiC waveguide. The product design is complete, and we’re ready for mass production.

X1 supports translation, navigation, AI assistant, teleprompter, a large virtual display, controller-supported gaming, and more.

For developers, we made the platform as open as we reasonably could, with system-level signing access, an open SDK, low-level hardware interfaces, raw sensor data access, and an independent App Center.

One of the biggest engineering decisions behind X1 was the single-layer Silicon Carbide waveguide. We’re happy to go deep on why we chose SiC, the trade-offs behind our 30° FOV, and what it took to get the optics ready for mass production.

Ask us anything about:

• SiC waveguides & optical design
• Hardware engineering and the 49g design
• Open SDK, system-level access & 3DOF tracking
• Software features & real-world use
• Manufacturing & mass production
• Kickstarter and what comes next

Members of our optics, hardware, systems, software, and product teams will be answering questions live.

And no need to hold back. If you disagree with any of our design decisions, ask us about them. We’re happy to talk about the trade-offs.

We’ll start answering today at 5:00 PM PDT / 8:00 PM EDT.

Drop your questions below.

Thanks again for all the support. See you in the comments.

— The Nimbo Team

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nimbopearl/nimbo-x1-worlds-lightest-sic-color-display-ar-glasses

Hey r/augmentedreality,

I work on the Nimbo X1 team — we’re a bunch of optical engineers, software devs, and AR nerds in HongKong who got tired of waiting for someone else to build the glasses we actually wanted to wear.

So in 2025 we just… started building them ourselves.

Nimbo X1 is now at the point where it’s fully designed and ready for production. We figured this was a good time to stop lurking and actually introduce ourselves.

We’re doing an AMA on August 20 5:00 PM PDT with our optics lead, systems guy, and me. Ask us about SiC waveguides, why we open-sourced the system signatures, manufacturing disasters, whatever. We will answer what we can. If we don’t know something, we will say so.

What we built, and why we went with SiC

The biggest decision we made was the optical stack. We ended up with a custom single-layer SiC waveguide. The idea was simple: get full-color AR from something thin enough that the glasses still look like glasses.

Most AR glasses use an RGB triple-layer glass waveguide. It works, but the stack ends up around 1.9 mm thick, and those layer interfaces are exactly where the front-facing rainbow fringing comes from.

SiC has a much higher refractive index than glass. That is what lets us do full-color in a single 0.7 mm layer — no RGB stack, no inter-layer fringing, and an optical engine that actually fits into a normal frame.

Sounds clean on paper. It was not clean in practice. Our first batch of SiC samples looked beautiful in the optical bench. Then we assembled them into actual glasses and the color uniformity fell apart. Some batches tested fine in isolation but behaved completely differently once they went through the full assembly process.

We went through something like 40 waveguide samples before we landed on an architecture that actually worked. The first 30 were basically unusable. There was a solid month where we thought we would have to give up on SiC entirely and go back to a conventional glass stack.

But we got there. Final design:

• 0.7 mm single-layer SiC
• 2000 nits
• No front-view rainbow
• 30° FOV

Yeah, 30° is not the widest. We know. We chose it on purpose — trading raw FOV for a form factor that we can actually wear for more than a demo. Whether that trade-off makes sense for you is something we genuinely want to hear.

Why We Chose an Open Platform

Another question we kept discussing internally was: What should developers actually be allowed to do with the hardware? As developers ourselves, we’ve always found it frustrating when experimentation stops at the application layer.

We also understand why consumer products often use more controlled software environments. It makes devices easier to support, improves consistency, and can make the experience much simpler for everyday users.

But for the kind of experimentation we wanted to encourage, we felt there was value in going further. So we decided to make Nimbo X1 as open as we reasonably could.

The platform includes:

• System-level signing access, allowing developers to sign and install their own system applications.
• SDK documentation covering the SiC waveguide display, 32MP camera, microphone array, IMU, and 3DOF tracking pipeline.
• Access to underlying hardware interfaces, including raw sensor streams rather than only higher-level APIs.
• Freedom to build your own systems and algorithms, including experimenting with your own 3DOF fusion or using IMU and camera data for your own spatial-computing projects.
• An independent App Center designed to make it easier for the community to share and iterate on applications.

We’re not sure yet what developers will ultimately do with this. That’s actually part of the point. If someone builds something with Nimbo that we never imagined, we’d consider that a success.

What Already Works Today

We also wanted Nimbo X1 to be useful out of the box, without requiring developers to build everything themselves. The glasses currently support:

• Real-time multilingual translation
• Navigation
• AI teleprompter
• Smart notification HUD
• Immersive video playback with a 90-inch-equivalent virtual screen, based on our current 30° FOV
• AI assistant
• 32MP AR camera
• AI-assisted coding in the AR view

These are features that are already working in the product today, rather than concepts for a future roadmap.

We want your honest take

We are not here to tell you we solved AR. We have not. We made a bunch of trade-offs and we are sure some of them will look wrong to people here.

So tell us what you think. If our SiC approach sounds dumb, say why. If you want to know something technical, ask. If you think 30° FOV is a dealbreaker, we will not argue — we will just want to know what you would have done differently.

We will be in the comments. See you at the AMA on August 20.

—  Nimbo team

kickstarter:

www.kickstarter.com/projects/nimbopearl/nimbo-x1-worlds-lightest-sic-color-display-ar-glasses