We perform a theoretical study on the recently observed unconventional Bose-Einstein condensations (UBEC) in the high bands of optical lattices. These exotic states are characterized by complex-valued condensate wave functions with nodal points or real-valued wave functions with nodal lines; thus, they are beyond the ``no-node'' theorem of conventional BECs. A quantum phase transition is driven by the competition between the single-particle band and interaction energies. The complex UBECs spontaneously break time-reversal symmetry, exhibiting a vortex-antivortex lattice structure.
In the context of Gross-Pitaevskii theory, we investigate the unconventional Bose-Einstein condensations in the two-species mixture with
p-wave symmetry in the second band of a bipartite optical lattice. An imaginary-time propagation method is developed to numerically determine the
p-orbital condensation. Different from the single-species case, the two-species boson mixture exhibits two nonequivalent complex condensates in the intraspecies-interaction-dominating regime, exhibiting the vortex-antivortex lattice configuration in the charge and spin channels, respectively. When the interspecies interaction is tuned across the SU(2) invariant point, the system undergoes a quantum phase transition toward a checkerboardlike spin-density wave state with a real-valued condensate wave function. The influence of lattice asymmetry on the quantum phase transition is addressed. Finally, we present a phase-sensitive measurement scheme for experimentally detecting the unconventional Bose-Einstein condensation in our model.