AI glasses raised the banner of 'revival' in 2024.

Among AI hardware transformed by large models, smart glasses have received endorsements from figures like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. As the industry hoped, this has sparked a renaissance in smart glasses. Notably, the Ray-Ban Meta collaboration between Meta and Ray-Ban achieved sales in the millions, igniting enthusiasm for AI glasses within the tech community.

Subsequently, Huawei equipped its Smart Glasses 2 with the latest HarmonyOS 4 and Pangu large model. At Baidu World, Baidu officially launched its Duer AI glasses. Following suit, smart hardware company Rokid introduced the next-generation AR glasses, Rokid Glasses.

More products are poised to enter the market, including offerings from Microsoft, Apple, Google, Samsung, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, Tencent, ByteDance, Meizu, and others. Nearly all leading tech enterprises are rumored to be preparing or evaluating glasses projects.

However, following the disappointing experience of Google Glass, many tech enthusiasts remain skeptical about this AI glasses revival.

Can these futuristic smart glasses truly bid farewell to 'electronic waste' and embark on a path of revival? The turning point for revival may lie in the arrival of an 'affordable moment'.

Since Google pioneered smart glasses in 2012, this category has been trapped in the 'cycle law' of hardware.

Early-stage new technology concept products were fervently pursued by geeks and futurists, leading to a boom and bubble. However, due to vague demand, immature technology, and unclear product forms, these devices eventually failed to gain widespread adoption due to their limited functionality and were abandoned by the consumer market, entering a period of silence before new technological iterations sparked new bubbles and declines.

Many new technologies often have only one chance; once the bubble bursts, their credibility is lost, like cryptocurrencies or quantum technologies. Yet, smart glasses always seem to pique the interest of giants and the public whenever AI technology achieves a breakthrough.

After more than a decade of ups and downs, the smart glasses industry has faced numerous setbacks, such as Google Glass shifting from consumer to enterprise use, the poor sales of Snap Spectacles, and the lack of interest in Tencent's smart glasses. However, tech enterprises, geeks, and the public are always willing to give smart glasses another chance, hoping for their real-world application.

What makes this category special?

Perhaps it's because smart glasses embody people's beautiful imagination of digital-physical integration and the elusive promise of near-eye display wearable devices.

Living in a digital world parallel to the real one has always been a dream shared by the tech community and sci-fi enthusiasts. Allowing people to interact with the physical world directly without smartphones, while being lighter and more comfortable than VR devices, smart glasses are seen as the next disruptive product after smartphones.

Apart from Google, domestic tech enterprises like Baidu also began exploring this field over a decade ago. At the 2014 Baidu World conference, a product named BaiduEye was unveiled, capable of search and translation through voice or gestures. According to media reports, Gu Jiawei, the head of BaiduEye, has since become a serial entrepreneur in the smart hardware industry.

Clearly, the unique charm of smart glasses continues to attract geeks and tech enthusiasts time and again.

However, limited by previous technological immaturity, smart glasses faced insurmountable bottlenecks in privacy protection, display quality, battery life, and functionality, failing to deliver on the promises made at concept product launches in the consumer market, leading to repeated disappointments.

Despite being trapped in the hardware cycle law, smart glasses have demonstrated tenacious vitality, finally welcoming a revival turning point in the era of large models.

The advent of large models has revolutionized the human-computer interaction experience of smart glasses, achieving significant improvements in speech understanding and AI function implementation, overcoming the shortcomings of artificial stupidity in the era of machine learning and reigniting public enthusiasm for smart glasses.

The combination of large models and smart glasses initially exhibited multiple development paths. Currently, there are mainly three productization routes:

The first is simple display 'AI+AR glasses.'

This category gained popularity with the success of Ray-Ban Meta, a collaboration between Ray-Ban and Meta. These glasses integrate core components like the motherboard, computing platform, and optical display module into traditional glasses, offering optimal wearing comfort while being fashionable and functional. With AI capabilities such as cameras, voice interaction, and multimodality, the product capabilities of smart glasses have undergone transformative changes.

Examples include Baidu AI glasses, smart glasses jointly developed by traditional eyewear brand LOHO, Shanji Technology, and iFLYTEK, as well as Rokid Glasses from Rokid and Sense smart glasses from Emteq Labs.

The primary difference from other smart glasses lies in their voice-based human-computer interaction. Users can activate the built-in AI assistant, powered by a multimodal large model, through voice commands to interact with AI and use functions like real-time image description and text translation.

For instance, Baidu AI glasses have a built-in camera for taking photos and videos, supporting voice interaction based on Ernie, Baidu's pre-trained model. This allows for functions like asking questions on the go during travel, real-time calorie monitoring during exercise, and multilingual translation in office and study settings. Backed by Baidu, whose AI model capabilities rank among the top globally alongside Meta, Baidu AI glasses are considered a Chinese counterpart to Meta Ray-Bans.

Founded in 2014, Rokid has accumulated resources in hardware, operating systems, and ecological partners in the AR glasses field over the years. With everything in place, Rokid seized the AI glasses trend, launching Rokid Glasses, which combines AI visual perception and AR display technology.

Specifically, Rokid Glasses use a green Micro-LED diffractive waveguide solution to display green UI and text on the lens. They also integrate Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen large model, enabling object recognition, text translation, math problem-solving, AI real-time navigation, and more. Rokid has done extensive work at the system and algorithm levels to achieve deep integration and collaboration between software and hardware, providing a smoother and more stable experience for large models on AI glasses.

The second route is full-color display 'AI+AR glasses.'

Previously, AR glasses explored solutions like geometric optical waveguides and LCoS full-color micro-display screens. These solutions offer high resolution, vibrant colors, and seamless integration with the real world, providing a more immersive visual experience. Compared to the simple display of the first type of AI glasses, this solution, combined with AI large models, can create a more sci-fi experience.

A representative product is Meta's Orion, which differs from the Ray-Ban Meta collaboration. Orion uses a neural wristband for gesture interaction with smart glasses, allowing various AI applications and virtual albums to be operated through multiple gesture recognitions.

The challenges of full-color display technology and human-computer interaction have not yet been fully resolved. For example, Orion's display clarity and distance are difficult to balance, with clarity decreasing when zoomed out, affecting the visual experience. Gesture interaction also faces issues like unstable algorithm recognition rates and high learning costs, making it difficult for users to persist in using it unless in high-frequency scenarios.

The third route is XR display devices combined with system-level AI.

Represented by Apple's Vision Pro, which combines XR mixed reality devices with AI to provide a disruptive spatial intelligence experience, it is currently the most sci-fi-like category of smart glasses. However, since its launch, issues like heavy weight (ten times that of the first route's glasses), fatigue (dizziness and eye strain after wearing for over 30 minutes), low usage frequency (few users, lack of sticky applications), and high price ($3,499) have limited its appeal to niche groups like geeks and tech bloggers, preventing it from entering the mass consumer market. There are rumors that Apple is developing AI+AR glasses similar to the first route.

Currently, after a period of diverse development, the mainstream form of large models + smart glasses is stabilizing, with Route 1 'AI glasses' that balance weight, functionality, and price attracting major manufacturers to accelerate their layout. This will be the primary form of this smart glasses revival.

As the product form of new hardware stabilizes, numerous tech enterprises, vertical industry enterprises, and even white-label factories want to participate, entering a stage of diverse development and driving explosive market growth. AI glasses are likely to recreate the 'affordable moment' seen in the smartphone sector.

In 2014, smartphones welcomed their 'affordable moment.' With the popularization of 4G networks, the form of straight-plate touchscreen smartphones stabilized, supply chains matured, and more consumers sought cost-effective smartphones, creating a huge untapped market. Numerous brands entered the fray, intensifying competition, eliminating counterfeit phones from the market and enabling large-scale smartphone adoption.

AI glasses are on the eve of their 'affordable moment.'

On one hand, market demand and acceptance have undergone transformative changes. Large models have completely reshaped the practicality and functionality of smart glasses. Capabilities like real-time AI translation, voice calls, AIGC, and visual understanding have been deployed in AI glasses, potentially replacing some smartphone functions and reaching a consumer-grade turning point in product capabilities.

Additionally, the traditional smart terminal landscape, including phones, tablets, and PCs, is difficult to shake up. This has unleashed the creativity of many small and medium-sized manufacturers and developers, providing smart glasses with opportunities for technological innovation and differentiated competition. Like the flourishing of brands during the affordable smartphone era, the product richness of AI glasses will further increase, meeting consumers' diverse needs through unique functions and finely-tuned models.

With improved practicality and more options, increasingly fierce market competition will drive the further maturation of the AI glasses supply chain, making overall costs more manageable. It is highly likely that an inflection point will open up around the RMB 1,000 mark.

Currently, Rokid Glasses are priced at RMB 2,499, offering high cost-effectiveness compared to other similar products on the market. Baidu AI glasses are expected to go on sale next year, reportedly priced in the RMB 2,000 range. Additionally, Xiaomi, small and medium-sized tech innovation companies, and others have also shown interest in this sector... In 2025, the 'affordable moment' for AI glasses may indeed be just around the corner.

After a decade of dreaming, smart glasses, seen as the next disruptive product after smartphones, have finally taken the first step into the mass consumer market.