Smart Glasses on Full Display at CES 2025: Hardware Is Ready, with Opportunities for Enabling Technologies

Despite being an epicenter for the latest technology and innovations, CES shows that the past few years have been light on Extended Reality (XR) devices, be they smart glasses or Virtual Reality (VR) headsets. This changed for CES 2025; XR was much more prominent in 2025 than 2024, and perhaps was the most prolific since 2017 or 2018. Smart glasses were very common, and there were some known names showcasing them, rather than unknown or Research and Development (R&D)-focused players only. Major tech vendors like TCL and Hisense had new glasses in equal measure, alongside their more established products like Televisions (TVs) and smart home devices. Smaller, but established companies like XREAL, Rokid, and Vuzix showcased updated and new glasses as well. Luxottica had not only Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses on display, but a handful of new devices in a similar vein such as Nuance Audio. Entirely new vendors, like Halliday and Even Realities, were included in the same conversation as these more established players, highlighting a more developed total ecosystem than has been seen in the past.

The breadth of smart glasses shown was great to see—while not a surprise to see glasses at the show, as that was expected, the scale and the commitment from large companies was impressive. It falls in line with market assumptions around smart glasses for 2025—Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses have proven very popular, and there were a number of devices in production in parallel to those showing up now. The main differentiator comes down to displays—whether there is one or not—and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities/AI platform running on the device. There were not any truly gimmicky devices at the show, just devices at varying stages of maturity within those differentiating factors—smaller companies using open source AI assistants may have a less mature AI go-to-market strategy than Meta does, for instance.

VR was present at the show, but definitely behind smart glasses in activity and interest. Sony was showing off its newly rebranded XYN VR headset, now targeting broader content creation use cases than just industrial. Pimax and DPVR were present, but seemingly without any notable updates. Pico was surprisingly absent. Meta did not have a booth, but Quest headsets were everywhere, cementing once again their dominance in the VR space.

With the ceaseless AI branding and marketing in the tech space broadly, and CES specifically, of course AI also made itself known within the XR space. No-display smart glasses, often called AI glasses, were present and popular, as evidenced by Meta’s continued success with Ray-Ban Meta glasses and Luxottica’s presence beyond Meta as well. More traditional smart glasses, with display capability, also leaned on AI as a platform value add—hands-free access to AI assistants remains an expected killer use case for all smart glasses form factors, and some machine vision efforts from major players like Meta and Google are expected to be—or already are—a critical element of the XR ecosystem.

While AI was a huge presence, the XR hardware on display did seem to stand on its own, with a realistic combination of price, target market, and potential use cases not entirely reliant on the advancement of and desire for AI assistants. Value in hands-free content access is universal, no matter how heavily AI is involved, and visual content display with true Augmented Reality (AR) glasses remains a unique differentiator to other product types. Targeted AI usage, rather than AI for the sake of AI, was apparent. For instance, machine vision advancements make their way into tracking by improving spatial tracking and/or object recognition for mixed reality experiences. Improved voice recognition, thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP), is similarly leveraging AI as an enabling technology, rather than a primary application itself.

While the show presented a great number of devices, there was nothing truly revolutionary. The known entities in XR presented new products that were in line with expectations, and new offerings from unknown players were neither hugely ahead, nor behind those. Importantly, this is a positive and a byproduct of the market focusing more, rather than a sign of immaturity. Instead of trying to deliver a do it all product as in earlier years in XR, companies are focusing on what is possible and delivering a tailored product to serve a specific application or market. Larger advancements are seen in the background, with R&D-focused endeavors pushing capability in displays, processing, and sensing primarily.

There are still some big tech names that are expected to be impactful in XR, but they were quiet at CES. Microsoft is a question mark in the XR space currently. It was an early proponent of smart glasses with HoloLens and VR with Windows Mixed Reality, and now both seem to be floundering. No XR presence at CES was not a surprise unfortunately, but something new and dedicated to what can be a rich ecosystem across consumer and enterprise sectors for them would be received well. They have an incredibly strong technology stack and portfolio that lends itself well to enterprise devices, or even more broadly, devices just touching PCs (e.g., VR devices targeting gaming). Google is not quiet in XR, though things seem slow moving for now. After a quiet reveal of Android XR in December 2024, CES 2025 did not bring any new hardware or announcements within the ecosystem—Samsung remains the primary hardware vendor with its Project Moohan VR headset, while promises of smart glasses in the future remain.

Expect CES 2026 to hold an equal or higher number of smart glass devices overall, and a higher percentage of those will have displays onboard enabling visuals. Today, it’s still a challenge to package display, processing, battery, audio, and sensors into a smart glasses form factor without the devices becoming overly bulky or ugly, but it feels like we are close to that changing. There are also some interesting display advancements happening mostly behind the scenes, or at least not in the regular press spotlight, and they just need a bit more time, along with the right hardware/Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) partner to productize it.