AI Glasses: Waiting for the "Sub-$1,000 Moment"
AI glasses, in 2024, raised the banner of "renaissance".
Among the AI hardware changed by large models, smart glasses have been endorsed by Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, and others. The industry, as they wished, brought a wave of renaissance in smart glasses. Especially the Ray-Ban Meta, a collaboration between Meta and Ray-Ban, has achieved million-level sales, completely igniting the technology industry's enthusiasm for AI glasses.
Since then, Huawei has equipped its Smart Glasses 2 with the latest HarmonyOS 4 system and Pangu large model; at the Baidu World Conference, Baidu officially released the Xiaodu AI glasses; the smart hardware company Rokid also followed suit, launching the new generation of AR glasses, Rokid Glasses.
There are more products ready to go, from foreign companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Samsung, to domestic companies like Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo, Tencent, ByteDance, and Meizu. Almost all top technology companies have news of preparing or evaluating glass projects.
However, after experiencing the mess of Google Glass's "hanging a sheep's head to sell dog meat," many geeks and technology enthusiasts are skeptical about this wave of AI glasses renaissance.
The sci-fi smart glasses, can they really bid farewell to "electronic waste" and embark on the road to renaissance this time? The turning point of the Renaissance may be the arrival of the thousand-yuan machine moment.
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Since Google pioneered smart glasses in 2012, this category has been trapped in the "cycle law" of hardware.
Early new technology concept products were wildly pursued by geeks and futurists, leading to a boom and bubble. However, due to vague demand, immature technology, and unclear product form, they eventually became functionally dispensable, unable to be popularized on a large scale, abandoned by the mass consumer market, entering a dormant period, and then with the update and iteration of technology, entering a new round of bubbles and decline.
Many new technologies often have only one chance, and after the bubble bursts, they lose credibility, such as virtual currency, and quantum XX. But smart glasses always itch the hearts of giants and the public when there are breakthroughs in AI technology.
After more than a decade of ups and downs, the smart glasses industry has also left a mess, such as Google Glass having to abandon C to B, turning to commercial scenes; Snap Spectacles' poor sales; and Tencent smart glasses being ignored... But technology companies, geeks, and the public are always willing to give smart glasses a chance, expecting it to enter reality.
What is so special about this category?
Perhaps it is because smart glasses, at the same time, bear people's beautiful imagination of the integration of numbers and reality, and the illusory promises of near-eye display wearable devices.
Living in a digital world parallel to the real world has always been a dream pursued by the technology industry and science fiction enthusiasts. Allowing people to interact directly with the physical world without smartphones, and being lighter and more comfortable than VR devices, smart glasses are seen as the next disruptive product after smartphones.
In addition to Google, domestic technology companies like Baidu also started exploring this track ten years ago. At the 2014 World Conference, they released a product called BaiduEye, which searches and translates through voice or gestures. According to media reports, Gu Jiawei, the person in charge of BaiduEye, also became a serial entrepreneur in the smart hardware industry after leaving Baidu.
It can be seen that the unique charm of smart glasses always attracts geeks and technology enthusiasts again and again.
However, due to the immaturity of previous technology, smart glasses have insurmountable bottlenecks in privacy protection, display effects, endurance, and functions, and cannot truly fulfill the promises made at the concept product launch in the mass consumer market, leading to disappointment again and again.
Smart glasses, trapped in the hardware cycle law, have shown tenacious vitality and finally waited for the turning point of Renaissance in the era of large models.
The arrival of large models has completely changed the human-computer interaction experience of smart glasses, making significant progress in voice understanding, AI function implementation, and other aspects, changing the artificial intelligence disadvantages of the machine learning era, and reigniting the public's enthusiasm for smart glasses.
The combination of large models and smart glasses shows a trend of multiple routes in the early stage. Currently, there are mainly three productization routes:
The first, simple display is "AI+AR glasses".
This type of product, with the cooperation between Ray-Ban and Meta's Ray-Ban Meta, has become a benchmark. In terms of product form, the main components such as the motherboard, computing platform, and optical display module are highly integrated on traditional glasses, with the best wearing comfort, and both fashion and functionality. With the addition of AI capabilities such as cameras, voice interaction, and multimodality, the product power of smart glasses has undergone a subversive change.
Baidu AI glasses, smart glasses jointly created by traditional eyewear brand LOHO, Flash Technology, and iFlytek, as well as Rokid Glasses launched by smart hardware company Rokid, and Sense smart glasses launched by Emteq Labs, all belong to this category.
The biggest difference from other smart glasses is the use of voice for human-computer interaction. Users can use voice commands to call up the AI assistant built into the multimodal large model and interact with AI, using real-time image description, text translation, and other functions.
For example, Baidu AI glasses have built-in cameras for taking photos and videos, supporting voice interaction based on Baidu's Ernie, which can achieve walking and asking in tourism scenarios, real-time monitoring of calorie consumption in sports scenarios, and multi-language translation in office and study scenarios. Backed by Baidu, the AI model's capabilities are in the same top tier as Meta globally, so Baidu AI glasses are also considered the Chinese counterpart to Meta Ray-Bans.
Established in 2014, Rokid has accumulated a series of resources in the AR glasses field over the years, including hardware, operating systems, and ecosystem partners. With everything ready, Rokid also seized the wave of AI glasses and launched Rokid Glasses, which have both AI visual perception and AR display technologies.
Specifically, Rokid Glasses display green UI and text on the lens through a green Micro-LED diffractive waveguide scheme. It also integrates Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen large model, with object recognition, text translation, math problem solving, AI real-time navigation, and other functions. Rokid has also done a lot of work at the system and algorithm level, achieving deep integration and collaboration of hardware and software, allowing large models to provide a smoother and more stable experience on AI glasses.
The second, full-color display is "AI+AR glasses".
Previously, AR glasses have been exploring geometric light waveguide+LCoS full-color micro-display schemes. The characteristic of this scheme is high resolution and bright colors, which can seamlessly integrate with the real world, bringing a more immersive visual experience. Compared with the simple display of the first type of AI glasses, this scheme combined with AI large models can create a more sci-fi experience.
The representative product is Meta's Orion, which is different from the AI glasses Ray-Ban Meta cooperated with. Orion uses a neural wristband to interact with smart glasses through gestures, operating various AI applications and virtual albums through multiple gesture recognitions.
The challenges of full-color display technology and human-computer interaction have not been completely solved at present. For example, the display effect of Orion, clarity, and distance are still difficult to balance. The clarity will decrease when zooming out, affecting the visual experience. And the gesture interaction method, the algorithm recognition rate is still unstable, and it requires a high learning cost. Except for the high-frequency scenarios of necessity, otherwise, users find it hard to patiently persist in using.
The third, XR display equipment+system-level AI.
Represented by Apple's Vision Pro, it combines XR mixed reality devices with AI to bring a subversive spatial intelligence experience, which is currently the most sci-fi in the smart glasses category. However, since its launch, problems such as large weight (ten times the weight of the glasses in plan 1), easy fatigue (dizziness and eye fatigue after wearing for more than 30 minutes), low usage frequency (few users, lack of sticky applications), and high price ($3499) have also limited it to a niche circle of geeks and technology bloggers, and it has never entered the mass consumer market. There is news that Apple is developing AI+AR glasses similar to Route One.
At present, after a period of contention, the mainstream form of large models+smart glasses is stabilizing, that is, route one "AI glasses" that take into account weight, functionality, and price, are attracting major manufacturers to accelerate layout and will be the main form of this round of smart glasses renaissance.
As the product form of new hardware stabilizes, a large number of technology companies, vertical companies, and even white-label OEM factories want to participate, entering a hundred flowers blooming stage, promoting the explosive growth of the market. AI glasses are likely to reappear the "thousand-yuan machine moment" in the smartphone field.
In 2014, smartphones ushered in their own "thousand-yuan machine moment". 4G networks began to popularize, the form of straight-touch screen smartphones became stable, the supply chain became mature, and more consumers hoped to buy cost-effective smartphones, thus creating a huge blank market. Countless brand regulars were eager to try and enter the white-hot competition stage, clearing out the market of Shanzhai machines, and smartphones thus began to scale and popularize.
AI glasses are also on the eve of the "thousand-yuan machine moment".
On the one hand, market demand and acceptance have undergone a subversive change. Large models have completely reshaped the practicality and functionality of smart glasses, with real-time AI translation, voice calls, AIGC, visual understanding, and other capabilities deployed on AI glasses, which can replace some of the functions of smartphones, and the product power is heading to a consumer inflection point.
In addition, the pattern of traditional smart terminals such as mobile phones, tablets, and PCs is already difficult to shake, and the creativity of many small and medium manufacturers and developers is released, providing opportunities for technological innovation and differentiated competition. Just like the brand bloom in the thousand-yuan machine era, the product richness of AI glasses will be further improved, and products with unique functions and model fine-tuning optimization can meet the different needs of consumers.
With practicality and more choices, the increasingly fierce market competition will promote the further maturation of the AI glasses supply chain, and the overall cost will be more controllable. It is very possible to open an inflection point of the exponential increase of around a thousand yuan.
At present, Rokid Glasses is priced at 2499 yuan, which has a higher cost-performance ratio compared to other similar products on the market. Baidu AI glasses are expected to be officially sold next year, and the price is said to be in the two thousand yuan range. In addition, Xiaomi, small and medium-sized technology companies have also come to the fore, eyeing this track... In 2025, the "thousand-yuan machine moment" for AI glasses may not be far off.
A dream of ten years, smart glasses, which are regarded as the next disruptive product after smartphones, have finally taken the first step into the mass consumer market.