Chinese smart eyewear makers shine at CES with focus on challenging Meta

Dozens of Chinese makers of smart glasses dazzled the exhibition floor at the recent CES trade show in Las Vegas, where they showed lightweight, artificial intelligence-powered eyewear aimed at a category that has been largely defined by Meta Platforms’ Ray-Ban Display.\nAt the four-day annual trade show, which concluded on Friday, Chinese brands made up most of the roughly 60 smart eyewear exhibitors. Their products ranged from audio-first frames designed for all-day wear to augmented reality (AR) glasses that overlay digital information onto the real world.\nExhibitors included Rokid, which debuted its audio-centric, no-display product called the Rokid AI Glasses Style supported by a mix of US and Chinese large language models; Xreal, which unveiled new AR wearables such as the Xreal 1S and the video gaming-focused ROG Xreal R1; and RayNeo, which introduced its X3 Pro Project, featuring eSIM support that allowed the glasses to run without a smartphone link.\nAlso at CES were LLVision Technology, which showcased its Leion Hey2 translation-focused glasses; Even Realities, which featured its newly launched 36-gram Even G2 smart eyewear with a companion smart ring; and Alibaba Group Holding, which showed its Quark AI Glasses. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.\nOther exhibitors included Meizu, Sharge, INMO, projector maker Xgimi and earphone brand Shokz.\n\nChinese firms’ strong showing at CES underscored how large language models (LLMs) and multimodal AI had made it possible to embed intelligence into a fast-developing range of consumer hardware and wearables. Some already considered smart glasses as potentially the next major personal computing platforms after smartphones.\n“The rise of smart glasses is riding directly on advances in AI,” said Wu Fei, founder and CEO of LLVision.\nHe said the Beijing-based company “did less” with its latest smart eyewear by focusing entirely on translation for now, instead of packing these products with many features. Powered by LLMs, the LLVision glasses support mixed-language input and multi-speaker conversations, with a real-time transcript floating in the user’s field of view.\nAccording to research firm IDC, smart eyewear shipments in China reached 623,000 units in the third quarter, up 62.3 per cent from a year earlier. Audio and video-recording glasses accounted for 454,000 units, while AR and virtual reality devices made up the remaining 169,000.\nGlobal shipments of smart glasses more than doubled in the first half of 2025, rising 110 per cent year on year, according to Counterpoint Research. Meta dominated the market with a 73 per cent share on the back of its Ray-Ban Display models. Founder Mark Zuckerberg reportedly set a 2025 sales target of 5 million units.\n\nChinese manufacturers, however, have quickly narrowed the gap, helped by a dense supplier ecosystem that had made it possible to squeeze increasingly complex components into a compact pair of glasses.\n“So many players are entering the market,” said Chen Menghao, general manager of the innovation centre at Appotronics, a laser technology provider that develops optical engines used in display-equipped smart glasses.\nAt CES, Appotronics exhibited its ultra-miniaturised Dragonfly G1 Mini, a 0.2 cubic centimetre single-green engine, alongside the 0.4cc full-colour Dragonfly C1. Both components enabled a single-engine binocular design – a key step towards lighter AR glasses.\nDemand from smart eyewear makers had surged, according to Chen. He said Appotronics expected 2027 to be “a very big year” for the product category, as smart glasses become “good enough” and affordable at under US$300 to enter the mainstream consumer market.\nBased on customer orders and conversations across the supply chain, this appears as the early acceleration phase of AI hardware, “not the peak of a bubble”, according to a Lens Technology staff member who declined to be identified. The company supplies glass covers and structural components for consumer electronics.\n\nLens Technology, headquartered in central Hunan province and a supplier to Apple, was also the manufacturing partner of Hangzhou-based Rokid. Other major Chinese supply chain suppliers at CES included Goertek, O-Film and Sunny Optical.\n“The evolution of chips and optical displays will be critical,” said Jason Low, a research director at Omdia. “They directly shape what smart glasses could become next.”\nChinese smart glasses makers and their suppliers are pushing each other to innovate, according to LLVision’s Wu. As each generation of components becomes smaller, lighter and more power-efficient, production costs could get lower, he added.\n“Advances across smartphones, cars, communications and semiconductors have lifted China’s overall manufacturing and design capabilities,” Wu said.\nThat also reflected how competition among smart eyewear brands would intensify, especially when these products are adopted by a broader audience.\n“The pace of growth over the past year exceeded our expectations,” said Zoro Shao, global general manager at Rokid, who spoke on the sidelines of CES.\nThe company expected to ship 1 million units across its product line in 2026, founder and CEO Misa Zhu Mingming told the Post in a November interview.\n\nChinese smart eyewear makers have also sharpened their focus on overseas markets.\nAbout a quarter of Rokid’s orders currently come from outside China, Shao said. The US accounted for roughly half of that demand, while Asia-Pacific markets made up 30 per cent. Even Realities exclusively sells its products overseas, while Xreal said international markets accounted for about 70 per cent of its sales.\nIn China, the government introduced a new national subsidy covering 15 per cent of the purchase price of smart glasses priced under 6,000 yuan (US$859) for 2026, part of a broader programme aimed at stimulating consumer spending, which could further accelerate the adoption of smart glasses.\n