I am visiting China right now, so in my stead is the lovely Sylvan Shen, who has written a great piece on China’s smart glasses ecosystem for this week. Content will return to normal next week.
Have a read of her great piece, and please drop her a message to let her know what you think!
Tom Ffiske, Editor of the Immersive Wire
Last month I made a short family visit to China during the Spring Festival (my first trip back in almost three years). Two things stood out for me from that trip: the ubiquitous AI chatbots ads in train stations, shopping malls and streets, and AI glasses ads, most notably for Alibaba's Quark AI Glasses (now rebranded as Qwen Glasses at MWC 2026). Now with big tech shifting serious attention to AI glasses since late last year, and Chinese brands like RayNeo, XREAL, Rokid and Even Realities actively shaping the space, this feels like the right moment to dive into China's smart glasses ecosystem.
I spoke with Lianqi Qiu, a Software Product Manager working in China’s smart glasses industry, to understand how the ecosystem actually works from the inside and where she thinks it's heading. Her work spans the operating system, application distribution ecosystem, and AI features. Because smart glasses are tightly hardware-software coupled, a significant part of her role is bridging the gap between hardware constraints and the software experience users actually feel.
Could you walk us through the major Chinese smart glasses product lines?
Chinese smart glasses brands have largely converged on making "lightweight glasses". There are three main product lines:
Viewing/Visual (e.g., RayNeo Air Series, XREAL One Series): Optimised for immersive entertainment and large-screen viewing.
Life Capturing (e.g., RayNeo V Series): Emphasis on first-person perspective capture and recording, powered by native AI upscaling and built for social sharing.
AI + AR Computing Platform (e.g., RayNeo X Series): Built for spatial computing with 6DoF, full-color optical display and heavier processing capability.
My XREAL 1S glasses - a tethered glasses that acts as a virtual portable monitor for media and gaming, featuring native 2D-to-3D conversion
Current input methods include touch control, voice commands, head gesture recognition, and external wearables like smart bracelets or rings. Target use cases are also coming into focus across three areas:
Productivity: Including teleprompters, meeting records, and remote collaboration.
Outdoor Scenarios: Such as photography, navigation, and sports.
Entertainment: Immersive viewing, game streaming.
Key hardware modules for smart glasses are reportedly mostly manufactured in China. Meta itself still relies on Chinese suppliers like Goertek while making efforts to diversify. What structural advantages does this give Chinese enterprises, how are they managing supply chain risk, and what headwinds do they face entering European markets?
Currently, the core components of smart glasses, such as optical modules, display modules, and sensors, are predominantly manufactured in China. This brings obvious structural advantages to Chinese manufacturers — cost competitiveness, supply chain synergy, and faster iteration cycles. The fact that Meta still depends heavily on Chinese optical and display suppliers shows how deeply embedded this advantage is.
Taking RayNeo as an example, it primarily relies on Chinese leading manufacturers like Goertek and Sunny Optical for optical and display components; for sensors, it uses some international solutions, but the domestic share is continuously increasing. That said, some Chinese manufacturers are also starting to diversify, for example, by establishing production bases in Southeast Asia to cope with geopolitical and export risks. For Chinese brands eyeing the European/UK market, three categories of friction may stand out:
Data privacy and compliance: GDPR requirements around always-on sensors and camera data will demand significant product and policy adaptation.
Patent and standards barriers: Local IP frameworks and certification requirements create entry friction.
Tariff and geopolitical uncertainty: Trade policy volatility adds unpredictability to pricing, logistics, and long-term market planning.
Compared to Meta Wearables Device Access Toolkit, how open are Chinese smart glasses in supporting developers, and what platforms/tools do they currently or plan to support?
A: Meta has been slowly opening up to developers with its toolkit, but access, particularly for the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, remains controlled. Similarly, Chinese smart glasses are opening up its access incrementally. RayNeo, for instance, provides a toolkit (RayNeo OpenXR Unity ARDK) for AR development on RayNeo X3 Pro. In general, the broader ecosystem is currently Android-centric, with some companies beginning to support XR engines like Unity to lower the barrier for AR content creators.
That said, deeper access still remains limited. Areas like display control, and advanced gesture input are still largely in grey-box testing or for targeted partnership rather than open to developers broadly. The Chinese developer ecosystem is moving toward more openness and collaboration, but the infrastructure is still catching up to the ambition.
Looking ahead, what improvements do you envision matter most for Chinese smart glasses enterprises. How are they planning to position themselves for what's coming?
A: Over the next two to three years, I see three areas driving the most meaningful change.
Input and interaction will be the biggest breakthrough zone. More natural methods including microgestures, eye tracking, EMG, and eventually neural signals, are on the horizon. Alongside that, multimodal AI will shift glasses from reactive tools to proactive ones, capable of sensing context and anticipating user needs.
Optical solutions on hardware will continue to evolve, with Micro-LED and waveguide technology emerging as the basis for all-day wearability. Improvements will emerge in display brightness and the mitigation of display artifacts like colour fringing and vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC). Through chip and battery optimisation, the ultimate goal is pushing device weight toward 30g-50g so that wearing them becomes imperceptible.
The ecosystem is where the longer game is being played. Android and Unity will stay mainstream. Chinese enterprises will increasingly focus on cross-device communication, connecting glasses with phones and in-car ecosystems for example, and building cross-device app stores. This approach can significantly lower the development barrier and bring more developers into the space.
In terms of strategic positioning, I see the industry moving in three phases:
Short-term: Continuous focus on consumer scenarios such as immersive media consumption, intuitive AI assistants and real-time translation to build user retention.
Mid-term: Exploration of new input methods like eye-tracking and EMG gesture interaction, alongside a push to bring waveguide technology to mass production and deeper coupling of multimodal AI with hardware compute.
Long-term: The focus shifts to competing for developer ecosystems and expanding into industry-grade applications. Plus achieving seamless cross-device integrations.
Overall, the Chinese smart glasses industry is preparing to shift from hardware experimentation to ecosystem competition. The key to achieving true scale in the next two to three years lies in three breakthroughs: intuitive multimodal interaction, truly imperceptible wearability, and a mature cross-device developer ecosystem.
