An AI vision of the future
Meta made a splash in 2023 with its first AI glasses developed in partnership with sunglass brand Ray-Ban. Several generations of smart glasses later, the Facebook parent kicked the race into higher gear when it unveiled AI glasses with a built-in, full-colour display in September of last year.
Chinese companies, however, are not standing aside and letting Meta have the market all to itself, Nikkei Asia’s Cissy Zhou and Yifan Yu write.
Backed by China’s strong supply chain, sizeable domestic consumer market and abundant choice of open-source AI models, tech giants and start-ups alike in the country are racing to launch their own AI glasses while Meta struggles to keep up with demand.
Buoyed by the strong performance of Meta’s latest smart glasses, HSBC raised its forecasts for both shipment volumes and average selling prices. It now estimates the total addressable market for smart glasses could reach about $200bn by 2040, a 33 per cent increase from its previous forecast.