Cyberglasses
I. Industry Overview: Explosive Growth with China as the Core Driver
2025 is widely recognized as the “breakthrough year” for AI smart glasses, with the industry demonstrating three key characteristics: accelerated technological iteration, expanded market scale, and an emerging ecological pattern. According to the latest data from IDC, global shipments of smart glasses are projected to reach 12.8 million units in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 26%. The Chinese market, in particular, has shown exceptional performance, with shipments expected to surge by 107% year-on-year to exceed 2.75 million units, making it the world’s largest market.
Consumer demand continues to soar – Tmall’s data reveals that as of October 30, the transaction volume of the AI smart glasses category skyrocketed by 2,500% year-on-year. JD.com’s “Double 11” final figures show a 346% year-on-year growth in transaction volume for the category, ranking it as the fastest-growing segment in the digital products sector.
The capital market is equally active. CINNO Research data indicates that the global AR/VR industry recorded 33 financing deals in Q3 2025, with a disclosed amount of 5.5 billion yuan. Funds are primarily flowing into core sectors such as optical design, AI algorithms, and ecological construction. The industry’s growth is driven by three core factors: deep integration of large AI models with hardware, cost optimization in the upstream industrial chain, and continuous expansion of practical consumer scenarios, transforming products from “niche gadgets” to “mass-market smart terminals.”
II. Core Technological Iteration: Dual Breakthroughs in Hardware Lightweighting and AI Capabilities
(1) Chip Technology: Dual-Chip Architecture Becomes Mainstream, Domestic Substitution Accelerates
As the core computing power support for AI glasses, chips account for one-third of the total BOM cost. In the high-end market, Qualcomm’s AR1 Gen1 has become the dominant platform, adopting a 6nm process with an AI computing power of 4 TOPS, supporting a single-eye resolution of 1280×1280. It is widely used by leading manufacturers such as Xiaomi, Alibaba, and Rokid.
The Snapdragon AR1+ Gen1 chip, launched in June 2025, further optimizes performance – its size is reduced by 26%, power consumption decreased by 7%, enabling a 20% reduction in temple width and supporting on-device operation of small language models (SLMs) with billions of parameters.
In the mid-to-low-end market, domestic chips are rising. Allwinner Technology’s V821 dominates with a cost advantage of 3-5 US dollars, forming a dual-chip architecture with Jieli’s AC7018, controlling the BOM cost of 8MP AI glasses within 200 yuan. NXP, Actions Semiconductor, and other enterprises have also launched specialized chips. NXP’s i.MX RT700 series excels in voice processing and low-power scenarios, meeting the needs of hearing assistance and navigation devices.
(2) Optics and Packaging: Waveguide Mass Production Lands, Advanced Packaging Solves Miniaturization Bottlenecks
Optical display technology continues to make breakthroughs, with waveguide solutions becoming mainstream in consumer products, and domestic enterprises achieving full industrial chain breakthroughs. Nanjing Parallel Vision has built the world’s first pilot production line for polarizing holographic waveguides, with an annual capacity of 50,000 pieces, a light efficiency of 3000 nits/lm, and a cost 60% lower than traditional solutions.
Guangzhou Optics Semiconductor’s Wuxi diffractive waveguide module base has a monthly capacity of 20,000 sets, which will expand to 40,000-50,000 sets by the end of the year. On the material front, National Carbon Semiconductor has invested 1.15 billion yuan to build a 12-inch silicon carbide waveguide material base, whose products feature high refractive index and low absorption rate, laying the foundation for optical performance upgrades.
Advanced packaging technology is being accelerated. Yida Info and Huafeng Technology jointly launched the “Yifeng Zhixin” project, focusing on 2.5D/3D packaging processes, which can reduce costs by 50% and improve integration density, promoting products to become lighter and thinner. The weight of mainstream products has decreased from 60 grams to around 49 grams, with products such as Rokid Leqi and Lenovo V1 weighing 38-39 grams and lens thickness as thin as 1.8 millimeters, offering a wearing experience close to ordinary glasses.
(3) AI Functions: From Auxiliary Tools to Intelligent Assistants
AI capabilities have become the core competitiveness of products. In H1 2025, AI smart glasses accounted for 78% of total shipments, a significant increase from 46% in H1 2024. Real-time voice wake-up, offline translation, visual search, and first-person shooting with automatic editing have become standard features, while some high-end products have achieved advanced functions such as AI text-to-image and scene information Q&A.
Meta’s Ray-Ban is equipped with the Llama2 large model, Alibaba’s Quark AI Glasses are connected to Tongyi Qianwen, and Xiaomi AI Glasses integrate Xiaoai Assistant with SenseTime’s “Rixin” large model, promoting the transformation of products from “display tools” to “portable intelligent assistants.”
III. Market Competition Pattern: Multi-Camp Fierce Competition, Chinese Manufacturers Dominate Niche Tracks
(1) Brand Camp Differentiation
The industry has formed three major competitive camps: tech giants lead with full industrial chain layout – Meta dominates the audio and audio shooting glasses market, with its Ray-Ban series becoming a consumer blockbuster; Apple plans to launch AI glasses in 2026, which is expected to reshape the industry pattern.
Domestic giants are accelerating their layout – Xiaomi, Alibaba, Baidu, and other companies have launched new products intensively. Xiaomi AI Glasses sold out within 30 minutes of release, and Baidu Xiaodu AI Glasses Pro entered the market with a 39-gram lightweight design.
Local professional brands focus on vertical fields – RayNeo, XREAL, Rokid, etc., have performed prominently in the ER glasses market. Chinese manufacturers account for over 97% of shipments in the binocular full-color glasses segment and more than 65% in non-binocular full-color glasses.
Cross-border brands continue to enter the market – Bolon and Rokid jointly launched 38.5-gram fashionable AI glasses, lowering the consumption threshold while expanding the young user group.
(2) Regional Market Characteristics
The Chinese market has become the core of global growth. In H1 2025, shipments of Chinese manufacturers exceeded 1 million units, accounting for 26.6% of the global market and 57.3% of the AR market. Leveraging their full-chain advantages from optical modules and sensors to complete machine assembly, domestic manufacturers are accelerating their expansion into overseas markets such as North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Brands like XREAL and RayNeo have achieved large-scale expansion in European and American markets.
North America remains the largest single consumer market, but the Chinese market leads in growth rate, with a projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 55.6% from 2024 to 2029.
IV. Application Scenario Expansion: Dual-Driver of Consumer and Industrial Sectors
(1) Consumer Scenarios: Full Coverage from Entertainment to Practicality
In travel scenarios, real-time navigation, multilingual translation, and scenic spot explanations have become rigid demands. In the field of daily entertainment, AI text-to-image, virtual-real social interaction, and immersive movie watching enrich experiences. In learning and office scenarios, 3D interactive learning and multi-task split-screen display improve efficiency.
Needs of special groups have received attention – overseas brand Envision launched visually impaired assistant glasses, which can recognize text in more than 60 languages, judge environmental status, and reshape the perception mode of visually impaired groups.
(2) Industrial Scenarios: Key Tools for Industrial Digital Transformation
In the industrial field, AI glasses have realized contactless inspection and emergency command in high-risk industries such as chemical engineering and mining. In manufacturing assembly guidance and equipment maintenance scenarios, virtual-real integration technology reduces decision-making time by more than 60%.
In the medical field, Huawei’s smart glasses help grass-roots hospitals reduce misdiagnosis rates by 25%, and Microsoft’s HoloLens2 assists in surgeries to reduce blood loss by 30%. Applications in education, public security, retail, and other fields are accelerating. The AR education glasses market is expected to account for 25% of the overall market, with a CAGR of 40%. After Hangzhou traffic police adopted AI glasses, the number of vehicle inspections per hour increased from 80 to 150.
V. Industry Challenges and Future Outlook
(1) Current Core Challenges
The industry still faces the “impossible trinity” dilemma: it is difficult to balance lightweight wearability, high performance, and long battery life, leading to return rates of some products as high as 30%-50%. Ecological construction lags behind – the lack of unified operating systems and human-computer interaction standards forces most manufacturers to conduct full-stack independent research and development, increasing R&D costs.
Capacity constraints of core components and high production process requirements have led to delivery delays for some brands. In addition, data privacy protection has become a focus – as devices’ ability to collect environmental and behavioral data enhances, higher requirements are put forward for permission management and data encryption technology.
(2) Future Development Outlook
2026 will become a key turning point for industrial scaling. IDC predicts that global smart glasses shipments will exceed 23.687 million units, and the Chinese market will reach 4.915 million units. Technically, flexible batteries and wireless charging technology are expected to solve the battery life bottleneck, and Micro LED full-colorization and massive transfer technology will continue to make breakthroughs.
On the policy front, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology has launched a special test for AI glasses, covering more than 60 indicators in 7 modules to promote industry standardization. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has included AR/VR in the “14th Five-Year Plan,” setting a target of over 350 billion yuan in industrial scale by 2025.
In the long run, AI smart glasses are expected to become the next-generation spatial computing portal. Deep integration with brain-computer interfaces and passive IoT will reshape the interaction between humans and the digital world. It is predicted that the global market scale will exceed 500 billion yuan by 2030, forming a dual-driver pattern of “consumer popularization + B-end deep cultivation,” and becoming the core track of the next-generation consumer electronics following smartphones and smart watches.