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Viture Pro can be connected to a game console and used as a large game screen, focusing on game users.
Viture founder Jiang Gonglue has worked at Microsoft Research Asia, Google and Rokid. Viture said in August this year that its cumulative sales have exceeded 200 million yuan.
“In the European and American markets, Viture is one of the few brands that has captured the minds of gaming glasses consumers.” An AI investor commented.
Even Realities was founded in 2023 by Wang Xiaoyi, the former chief product officer of Nut Projection, and received investment from Sequoia China around September this year.
Even Realities G1, which has no speakers or cameras, has a monochrome display screen for displaying translation, navigation and notification prompts.
Since the launch of the popular Ray-Ban Meta in October last year, the disclosed financing for AI glasses includes Ray-Ban Technology, TCL-incubated Thunderbird Innovation, Yingmu Technology, Rokid, INAIR, and Gyges Labs (former Xianshun Technology) and so on.
An industry insider said that 2025 will be the first year of AI glasses, and nearly a hundred brands will release products, setting off a "Battle of Hundreds of Mirrors."
The players in this big battle include major mobile consumer electronics companies such as Xiaomi, Samsung, and Xingji Meizu; there are also technology giants who want to explore AI hardware. As we mentioned before, ByteDance is considering For AI hardware, Baidu subsidiary Xiaodu has also launched Xiaodu AI glasses.
In the entrepreneurial camp, there are a number of companies established around 2017 such as Rokid and XReal, as well as new companies that emerged after the Ray-Ban Meta trend.
Shenzhen’s supply chain and white brand power are also ready to move. An industry chain person told us that a pair of "AI glasses" using public molds in Huaqiangbei costs only 30-50 US dollars in hardware and can be shipped in one month and then sold overseas: "You can even achieve good results first. Pictures are posted on the Internet, and there is an order for reproduction."
This scene seems familiar: since Google Glass in 2012, smart glasses and headsets have appeared.The craze for traditional displays has waxed and waned many times, and entrepreneurs and gold diggers have come and gone.
The first few rounds were huge, but they all ended in disappointment - according to consumer electronics analysis institutions IDC and Counterpoint, global smart glasses shipments (excluding VR headsets) will be 1.1 million units in 2023 , the cumulative volume from 2021 to 2023 is less than 3 million units. During the same period, the shipments of TWS headsets (wireless Bluetooth headsets) and smart watches, which are often compared with glasses, were respectively 927 million and 798 million.
The glasses war is reigniting with new templates and a more mature supply chain.
Hot, but not that hot“This year it’s because of Ray -Ban Meta, last year it was because of Apple VisionPro, and there was a wave of companies the year before last, because--" When an investor took stock of the glasses and head-mounted display entrepreneurial projects that have emerged in recent years, he couldn't remember the cause of the craze in 2022.
After a while, he finally found the thread that had been buried by new hot topics such as large models, embodied intelligence, agents, and "AI Native App". "Yes. , Metaverse.”
The past few rounds of smart glasses craze all started with concepts, but expectations often preceded reality. The actual sales of Google Glass ten years ago and Vision Pro released last year were far less than expected.
The latest round of craze is different. The market has seen at least one benchmark product that sold more than 1 million units a year - the Ray-Ban Meta, which was released in October last year.
This so-called "AI glasses" without lens display, only headphones, voice interaction and camera functions were not optimistic at first. After all, there is no essential difference between it and Meta’s previous generation of glasses, Ray-Ban Stories, which only sold 300,000 units in more than two years. But by the first half of this year, sales of Ray-Ban Meta surged beyond expectations and exceeded 1 million units by May.
Meta founder Zuckerberg himself said: "We seriously underestimated the need for it."
Zuckerberg wears Ray-Ban Meta. The glasses have a 12-megapixel camera and an array of five microphones. They can replace headphones for listening to music and making phone calls. They can also rely on AI and cameras to identify objects in front of them, take photos or a video and quickly share them with friends on social networks.
According to calculations by many institutions, by the end of this year, the cumulative sales of Ray-Ban Meta, which starts at US$299, will exceed 2 million units, which is about 4.3 billion people.The sales of coins are equivalent to the annual revenue of Shaoyin, a star company of bone conduction headphones.
The popularity of Ray-Ban Meta is the direct reason why a number of new companies emerged and got money.
However, compared with overseas consumer hardware companies established by large models, AI applications and star product managers, some investors believe that financing for AI glasses is actually not that hot: there are many companies and the scene is hot, but Invest in markets where competition is less intense.
An investor who has looked at more than 20 AI glasses from last year to this year told us that the current financing amount of such companies is concentrated in tens of millions of dollars, and the valuation is around US$100-200 million. It’s hard for him to name who is recognized as the “first tier”.
We learned that in the field of AI glasses, there has even been a phenomenon of valuation Downround (that is, the valuation of the new round of financing is lower than before): a company that won the top prize in China last year The AI glasses company invested by Internet companies was originally valued at more than 200 million US dollars (about 1.5 billion yuan), but in the new financing currently opened, the valuation has been adjusted back to about 1 billion yuan.
The most pessimistic people believe that there is no room for entrepreneurship in this field.
“Big manufacturers have the ecological synergy of hardware, but hardware cannot build a moat.” A leading Chinese dollar fund investor said: “It is the big manufacturers in the United States that do well. Domestic Xiaomi and Byte also do it. , I don’t see the opportunity for startups”
Hot money brings the lowest goal, and AI indicates the highest goalThe lively but not hot status quo is rooted in the differences in the investment market over AI glasses.
“The lower limit is mobile phone accessories such as TWS headsets, and the upper limit is the next generation of smart devices.” An investor said.
Ray-Ban Meta has partially proved the lower limit, and its current success has nothing to do with AI.
First of all, it is a pair of good-looking and easy-to-wear glasses: it weighs only 49 grams, which is slightly heavier than ordinary sunglasses, but far lighter than similar smart glasses. The appearance is consistent with the classic Ray-Ban model, and the price is only slightly higher. expensive.
Although the functions of the second generation have not changed compared with the first generation, the performance of the chip and camera have been greatly improved. The headphone speaker module has been upgraded from two speakers to an array of five speakers, allowing for better sound collection and playback. ;The camera pixels have been upgraded from 5 million to 12 million, making it more usable and easier to use.
Lu Yong, who has worked for Huawei and Alibaba and served as the product planning director of D, P, and Mate series flagship mobile phones at Huawei, is currently the senior vice president of Xingji Meizu Group and president of the XR Business Unit, responsible for Xingji Meizu smart glasses products.
Lu Yong said that he believes that the first core element of smart glasses is that they look good., the second is lightness, AI is still a “nice to have” thing, not just a necessity; users use glasses 70% of the time to listen to music and take photos, and 30% of the time to use some AI functions, such as voice interaction and image recognition.
Consumers also prefer traditional glasses to electronic products when purchasing Ray-Ban Meta: American consumers can purchase Ray-Ban offline at more than 200 direct-operated stores and more than 1,000 dealer stores. For glasses, US medical insurance can also reimburse some of the cost of myopia lenses.
A number of products from new and old companies are now imitating the form of Ray-Ban Meta: only retaining earphones, voice interaction and camera functions, making them light and useful for everyday use.
An industry insider believes that if you want to sell well, you should cut off all peripheral configurations and retain only basic functions. "Orion will definitely not sell as well as Ray-Ban Meta. It is too complicated and expensive."
Orion is the next generation AI glasses product released by Meta in September this year. The consumer version will be released at the earliest. On sale after 2027. It has many new configurations such as MicroLED display, hand tracking, eye tracking, etc., and is called the next generation computing platform by Zuckerberg. Meta officials say Orion costs more than $10,000.
Zuckerberg wears a Meta Orion demo machine, a bulky product that is far from ready for public sale.
Meta’s cooperation model with Ray-Ban is also being imitated: among Chinese companies, Thunderbird has partnered with Doctor, Rokid has partnered with Tyrannosaurus, and Hive’s partner is Baodao Glasses. In addition to providing services such as optometry and prescription glasses, traditional eyewear brands will also allow smart glasses to enter their own offline channels.
The supply chain that has matured with smartphones also gives latecomers the opportunity to produce products quickly and at low cost. This was something we didn’t have in 2012 during the Google Glass craze.
Meta, as a pioneer, has already mastered the supply chain. An industry chain person told us that you can use Meta’s supply chain to make a similar product, but the hardware cost will not be lower than Meta.
The most expensive component of the Ray-Ban Meta is the Qualcomm XR1 chip, which costs about $55. Chinese companies in the supply chain include Baiwei Storage, Sunny Optical, Goertek, etc.
In addition to hardware, the software required for AI glasses - the speech model is also more mature, and downstream hardware manufacturers can find suppliers with good dialogue and recognition capabilities.
According to official information, the price of OpenAI’s speech recognition token is 5 US dollars/million, while the public quotation of Huoshan Cloud, the exporter of domestic byte speech models, is 0.8 yuan/million, wordsJie has shown a lot of sincerity in giving away profits and grabbing customers. And we learned that some large model startups are also willing to give away large amounts of free tokens to eyewear companies.
As for the upper limit, that is, whether AI glasses can become the next generation of smart terminals, and whether this is an opportunity for startups, these are the main differences.
Some investors believe that the higher ceiling of AI glasses may be that it may require a new software and hardware ecosystem.
At the hardware level, glasses have some features that mobile phones do not have. One thing that can be clearly seen now is Always on. It carries a camera that can always see the outside world, which will bring New interaction requirements.
This is similar to the fact that mobile phones have GPS (positioning system) compared to PCs (personal computers), so applications related to mobile attributes can be born, such as taxi hailing, food delivery, etc. Uber, Didi, etc. have emerged. Opportunities for new companies such as Meituan.
At the software level, new hardware features may also bring new OS and software application ecosystems, which is also an opportunity for new companies.
As for how big the upper limit is, Zuckerberg provided the most optimistic version: In an interview with The Verge in September this year, he said that 1 to 2 billion people around the world now wear glasses every day, just like Just like upgrading from feature phones to smart phones, everyone will wear a pair of smart glasses in the future, and many people who don't wear glasses will eventually wear them.
The problem with this most optimistic expectation is that the mainstream version of Ray-Ban currently sold is sunglasses rather than myopia glasses, which means that it has not yet penetrated the widest range of eyeglass users.
Xingji Meizu Lu Yong also believes that glasses that are always worn on the bridge of the nose are the best large model hardware carriers, rather than sunglasses that need to be stored, or mobile phones that are occasionally put into pockets.
When AI glasses continue to develop and expand the user base, under the current technology, they will face the impossible triangle of "cost, thinness, and functionality", and a product can often only choose two of them. This will all affect the final market ceiling.
Under Ray-Ban Meta, there is no second placeZuckerberg said in an interview in September this year that Meta prefers to release products when they are not yet complete, collect feedback and then iterate quickly, rather than spending more time polishing them like Apple.
Ray-Ban Meta still has many problems with the current experience. For example, the camera is placed on the right temple, causing the angle of view of the photos it takes to be obviously skewed to the right. This could be a breakthrough for the pursuers.
The next node to observe the performance of the pursuers will be in the middle of next year: the release time of AI glasses products from major manufacturers such as Xiaomi and Samsung will be concentrated in the first and second quarters of next year.
Xingji MeizuLu Yong said that if the smart glasses market wants to explode, it must be led by star products. At the same time, there are enough brands on the market and the range of user options is large enough. Big manufacturers must also enter the education market; just like the smart watch market is rapidly detonating , it captured the urgent need of "health" and allowed smart glasses to leap from "Early Adopters" to "Early Majority". They judged that the first possibility is real-time translation, and the second possibility is Photograph.
An industry chain person predicts that AI glasses will not only need to establish sufficient consumer awareness, but also require further maturity of the supply chain, and large-scale production will have to wait until 2026.
Different companies now have different market strategies - startups such as Viture and Even Realities are more targeting overseas markets; while Internet companies and mobile phone companies will give priority to the domestic market, or pay equal attention to both domestic and foreign markets.
The product form of AI glasses has not yet converged. The disagreement is whether to use display functions that are not yet mature in technology and will make the glasses heavier and more expensive, that is, whether to use the lenses as screens.
In addition to Ray-Ban Meta, the glasses products of Baidu, Xiaodu, Byte, and Xiaomi, as well as startups VueGlasses, Honeycomb Technology, and Shanji, are currently all screen-less.
Zuckerberg said in an interview in July this year that adding a display screen will make glasses thicker and more expensive. In the next 10 years, smaller glasses with screens may appear, but for now He believes that users still prefer products like Ray-Ban Meta.
Products from companies such as Xreal, Viture, Even Realities, INAIR, Yingmu, Thunderbird and Gyges Labs, as well as Meta’s next-generation product Orion, all have lens display functions.
Rokid Glasses are one of the few products on the market that combine photography and display.
Choose displays, some of which serve specific scenarios. For example, Viture is mainly used for games, Even Realities is mainly used for navigation and translation, Thunderbird and Xreal are mainly used for movie viewing, and they all need to be displayed.
Xingji Meizu Air2 smart glasses also chose the display function when the project was launched in 2023. Based on Lu Yong’s past experience as a Tmall elf, he concluded: For people, it is very convenient to use voice to output information to the machine. Efficient, but receiving information from a machine using voice is inefficient.
Xingji Meizu StarV Air2 smart glasses, which have two microphones and a monochrome display screen.
“If you don’t want to listen to the voice assistant talking all the time, you may turn it off in 5 seconds,” Lu Yong said. So they chose the route with display - using voice to output information and visual inputInput information, that is, text, images, etc. are presented through the screen. After that, they will launch two display and camera products in parallel, and try to eventually integrate the display and camera into one product.
In terms of product progress and sales, all latecomers are significantly behind Meta.
An investor said that the only advantage of start-up companies that can now obtain financing compared with large manufacturers is that they can do so quickly. The core is to see whether you can seize the first wave of volume window and establish a certain brand awareness.
Compared to companies that are just waiting and watching, players who enter the market earlier have the advantage and opportunity of accumulating practical experience. Lu Yong of Xingji Meizu said that only by actually doing it can you accumulate knowledge, such as whether the knob or sliding operation is more convenient. "If you don't do it yourself, you won't realize that the sliding operation is so inaccurate." How to improve wearing comfort Sex, how to make the frame as thin as possible while ensuring rigidity, etc. For example, Meizu customized the lens material in order to be the lightest, and the temples also used nylon material for the first time.
Another advantage of big manufacturers is ecology. Lu Yong said that if AI glasses want to provide enough information to facilitate people’s lives, they must connect to more platforms. People like Ali have mastered more App and data companies will have natural ecological advantages.
Compared with the emergence of new companies and products, AI glasses are still in an early stage of being “not worthy of their name” and “not AI enough”. An industry insider said: “Below 100,000 units a year is not enough in this industry. Let’s not even talk about starting.” The current market situation is: under Ray-Ban Meta, “there is no second place that can be achieved.”
This is a bit like the consumer drone market. Except for DJI, it is all others. DJI alone accounts for about 90% of the market share - Ray-Ban Meta’s half-year sales are close to The full-year sales volume of the entire smart glasses category in 2023.
Starting from the second quarter of next year, when a new wave of AI glasses products are launched, the market performance of these products will be revealed: is this a story of a single hit product that unexpectedly became popular, or a new opportunity for a group of people.