Latest news with #Wigain
Gizmodo
3 days ago
- Business
- Gizmodo
China's Smart Glasses Are Once Again Going All the Way Off
There are officially too many wild pairs of smart glasses coming out of China to keep track of. First, it was Xiaomi with its Ray-Ban-stomping pair of glasses that can record 45 minutes of consecutive video and boast an 8.5-hour battery life. Then, just last week, a company called Wigain announced a breakthrough in making mass-producible smart glasses with optical waveguide lenses. Those, I might add, also feel very Meta-killing. Now, it's Alibaba's turn, or it's about to be if rumors are to be believed. According to unconfirmed reports from the XR Research Institute, which is also connected to rumors surrounding the third-gen version of Meta's Ray-Bans, Alibaba could release its first pair of self-made smart glasses very soon, and they could be—similar to the aforementioned glasses—far more advanced than what Meta offers in the U.S. While I'm normally more skeptical of unconfirmed rumors like this, there's already supporting evidence on Reddit percolating out of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai. Pictures, which surfaced on Friday, show a huge promotional pair of smart glasses hovering over a section of the conference for Tmall Genie. If you're not familiar, Tmall Genie is an Alibaba-owned brand, and rumors suggest that the glasses will allegedly launch under that banner. And on top of those clues, there's also the fact that Alibaba already has one toe in the smart glasses world with software. First look at the Alibaba smartglasses with binocular display! byu/AR_MR_XR inaugmentedrealityXiaomi has already partnered with Alibaba on a payment feature for its new AI smart glasses and has collaborated with AR glasses company RayNeo, so, given those ties, Alibaba seems like an obvious player in the space. If rumors are accurate, its product may be more advanced than Meta's Ray-Bans in a couple of key ways. For one, Alibaba may offer a pair of glasses with an actual display on them, which is something that Meta has yet to do. That will likely be the game-changing factor for most people on the fence about smart glasses who don't find them quite 'smart' enough to warrant spending money on a pair. On that same note, XR Research Institute suggests that Alibaba's glasses will include optical waveguide lenses that make passthrough on AR glasses sharper and clearer—aspects that early startups in the AR glasses space have struggled with. Even without knowing or confirming the rest of the smart glasses' specs or features, those things alone would be enough for Alibaba-made glasses to blow past Meta Ray-Bans, which are arguably the most popular brand of smart glasses in the U.S. It's once again proof that China is cooking on smart glasses and probably evidence that we can expect a lot more from China-based brands on that front. I'm curious whether any of those technological advances trickle over into the U.S. market as a result. My fingers are crossed, because as much as I use Meta's Ray-Bans, it's about time Meta takes a big step forward into the world of on-lens displays.
Gizmodo
16-07-2025
- Gizmodo
China's Wild World of AR Glasses Has Me Convinced Meta Is Cooked
I know I've said it 1,000 times, but AR glasses are hot right now, and arguably no one is more on fire than China. While the U.S. is patiently waiting for Meta to release anything even resembling its prototype AR glasses, Orion, China seems to be making strides day by day. The latest example? These glasses with full-color optical waveguide lenses and 900 nits of brightness from a Chinese company called Wigain. In plain speak, they're full-color AR glasses with enough brightness to actually use outdoors in the real world. And the kicker here is that Wigain says they're actually 'mass-producible.' The way Wigain talks about its glasses, they sound an awful lot like the Orion-based glasses Meta is slating for 2027, except they're actually a real thing you can buy right now, or at least pre-order. Wigain says its AR glasses, called Omnision, have a 50-degree field of view, use Sony's micro-OLED screens, and have an 800p resolution with a full-color display. They're powered by Qualcomm XR2 Gen 1, too, which should make them fairly snappy. If you want more power, there's also a Wi-Fi 7-enabled 'station' that uses Gen 2 of the same Qualcomm chip. Wigain is claiming six hours of battery life—fairly solid for glasses that claim to do this much. Looks-wise, they leave something to be desired, but Wigain did manage to get the glasses down to a serviceable weight of 120 grams. Don't get me wrong, I'm skeptical of Wigain's claims here, but the fact that it recently demoed the glasses in real life at an Expo in Osaka, Japan, and they have a real launch date and pre-orders is forcing me to take the Omnison glasses seriously. There's also the fact that Wigain doesn't seem to be alone in its success with pushing the ball forward on XR. China's Xiaomi, as I recently covered, just unveiled a pair of XR glasses that pretty much kick the Meta Ray-Bans' ass. They aren't AR glasses, to be sure, but they double the Ray-Bans' battery life, are capable of first-person video calling, and can allegedly record video for 45 minutes as opposed to the Ray-Bans' three minutes, and they even have a mobile payment feature that uses QR codes and voice verification. Oh, and they cost about the same as Meta's competitor. Listen, I'm not a market analyst or anything, but if I were a betting man and you asked me to wager which country's AR glasses are going to actually succeed from a technical standpoint, I'm going with China all the way here. And as someone who's been covering technology for a while now, that story is as old as time—and not just relegated to XR glasses. EVs in China, for example, are not just incredibly cheap, but also arguably more advanced than the ones sold here in the U.S. On paper, Chinese automakers like BYD are winning by a mile, though the U.S. market is obviously a whole separate entity for political reasons, and vice versa. Either way, I, as a consumer, am once again on the other side of the coin, stateside, wishing that U.S. companies would take some cues from their Chinese counterparts. Because, damn, Wigain—if its glasses are the real deal—just beat Meta's Orion to the punch.
