01 The Smart Glasses Market That Has Yet to Arrive at Singularity
Compared to devices like smartphones and smartwatches, smart glasses are clearly a more niche market. According to IDC data, global AR glasses sales in 2023 reached 480,000 units, while smart glasses sales totaled 1.01 million units.
Smart glasses themselves are not a new trend; this sector can be traced back to 2002 when the Japanese company Olympus launched the Eye-Trek series of consumer-grade head-mounted displays. As exploration in this field progressed, Google released the Google Glass Explorer Edition in 2012, positioning it as a smart device, while Microsoft launched the HoloLens, characterized by AR and VR, in 2015, both of which drove continuous changes in the smart glasses market landscape.
Of course, despite nearly 20 years of development, smart glasses have consistently remained a niche product with sales in the millions.
In fact, during this relatively short development period, smart glasses were once not considered a good business, for example:
The first-generation Google Glass was priced as high as $1,500, faced a lack of applications, and posed privacy risks, which severely impacted the entire smart glasses sector.
BaiduEye, which debuted in September 2014, has yet to be launched. The smart glasses Spectacles launched by Snapchat in 2017 have gone through several generations, but despite improvements each time, they have still not gained market popularity.
Snap first released the Spectacles with a built-in camera in 2016, but due to its exaggerated appearance, poor operation, and unclear user scenarios, the first generation sold only about 150,000 units, resulting in a loss of nearly $40 million.
In 2018, Intel unveiled a concept design for Vaunt smart glasses, but due to a lack of confidence from the capital market, Intel shut down its New Devices Group in April of the same year and terminated the Vaunt smart glasses project announced in February.
In fact, the performance of the vast majority of smart glasses is limited, and to some extent, they are seen merely as another screen for smartphones. Although these devices are equipped with independent operating systems, their functions remain relatively simple and limited. Aside from voice interaction, photography, and navigation—functions that smartphones already offer—the control capabilities of smart glasses are also quite basic. As for the cool application scenarios of AR, most remain in the conceptual stage.
Due to the significant gap between actual user experience and expectations, consumers are not very interested in these seemingly high-end but impractical smart glasses and are unwilling to pay for them.
Especially in the early days, the maturity of AR technology required advancements in multiple fields such as sensors, displays, and batteries, but at that time, these technologies were still in their infancy, making significant breakthroughs hard to see.
Additionally, another core issue with AR glasses is the difficulty in balancing computing power and energy consumption, leading to the need for a split design. Even so, due to limitations in display mechanisms, AR glasses still tend to be too heavy. In the field of smart glasses, the maturity of basic hardware still requires time, and significant breakthroughs in spatial perception and display technology are needed due to costs and technical challenges. Therefore, it seems that the singularity for the smart glasses market has yet to arrive.
02 AI + AR May Become a New Trend
In fact, pursuing excellent performance is one direction for the development of smart glasses. From this perspective, Microsoft's HoloLens has taken this route, but the market's response to the various generations of HoloLens has been less than satisfactory, with poor sales. This indicates that merely betting on performance is not the best choice.
In contrast, Meta has adopted a dual-pronged strategy, pursuing extreme performance on one hand while leveraging the continuous iteration of AI models and computing hardware to deeply integrate AI solutions to further open up the market. As early as September 2023, the second-generation product Meta Ray-Ban launched in collaboration with Ray-Ban exemplifies this strategy. This product weighs less than 50g, with a starting price of just $299, addressing the pain points of weight and cost. Compared to the first generation, the second generation significantly improved camera quality and sound quality while maintaining the same shape and price, with battery life and charging speed increased by over 30%, and upgrades in chips and storage. Additionally, the second generation introduced AI features in April 2024, which, although currently only supports English conversations and is limited to users in the United States and Canada, has shown a clear upward trend in sales performance.
At the MetaConnect conference on September 25, 2024, Meta unveiled its first AR glasses prototype, codenamed Orion, reigniting market interest in the smart glasses sector. The Orion glasses consist of three parts: the glasses themselves, an electromyography wristband (EMG), and an external computing module, utilizing a SiC lens + etched diffraction waveguide and MicroLED optical solution, achieving a FOV of 70 degrees, making it the product with the largest field of view among small AR glasses currently available. The glasses weigh only 98g, feature a magnesium frame, and are equipped with seven cameras. In terms of intelligence, Orion supports AI voice, gesture tracking, and eye tracking, and allows users to control it using neural signals via the EMG wristband. Users can wear the glasses to open multiple MetaHorizonApp windows for multitasking or use MetaAI to recognize and label real-world objects, giving us a new understanding of smart glasses.
In addition to Meta's series of products, Web3 is also becoming a new solution. The newcomer V3X in the smart glasses sector balances extreme performance, user experience, and AI capabilities while further integrating a series of Web3 features, giving it advantages in decentralized security, smart transactions, personalized AI interactions, and device comfort. V3X is more aligned with users who have higher demands for data security, daily convenience, and personalized services, and by introducing cryptocurrency elements, it aims to maximize users' attention value and data value, potentially even generating income for users.
In fact, before V3X was launched, the smart glasses field had not ventured into Web3. Therefore, while V3X is already in the first tier in terms of performance and functionality, it has also introduced a series of Web3 features, undoubtedly sparking strong curiosity among the market, especially among some Web2 players.
03 Is V3X the Ultimate Form of Smart Glasses?
Whether it's Google, Microsoft, or Meta, when they launched smart glasses products, they often positioned them as smart wearable devices, primarily as visual entertainment products.
However, V3X's product positioning is different; it is not only a smart entertainment device but also emphasizes the attributes of a "personal assistant," aiming to change the way users manage their lives and assets.
V3X smart glasses benefit from integration with its long-term strategic partner, the Web3 AI intelligent engine system D3X, providing exceptional AI capabilities and seamless access to Web3. By offering a voice-controlled AI assistant, V3X provides seamless decentralized real-time interaction for both personal and professional users, enhancing daily life experiences and asset transaction experiences while ensuring data security through decentralized infrastructure.
To perfectly combine cutting-edge technology and user experience, the V3X device is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 processor and dual 1080p AR displays, ensuring users receive high-definition displays and strong performance during use. It has a built-in 3500mAh battery, supporting up to 6 hours of active use to meet all-day demands.
In terms of intelligence, V3X's high-performance natural language processing (NLP) technology supports natural and intuitive conversations, adapting to and predicting user needs in real time, providing personalized services that allow users to perform convenient operations through voice interaction, significantly enhancing the user experience.
Additionally, V3X's hardware design emphasizes technical compatibility, fully supporting Android and iOS ecosystems, ensuring users can connect and use seamlessly across various devices. Through collaboration with D3X, V3X enhances its smart advantages in the financial sector and, combined with advanced AI capabilities, greatly expands its application scenarios.
To further enhance usability, V3X supports three interaction methods: voice interaction, gesture interaction, and ring interaction (with several buttons on the ring to select content on the glasses' screen).
Leading a New Trend in Intelligence
So when we use the V3X smart glasses, in addition to engaging in some AR-based entertainment activities, we can also further enjoy the conveniences brought by AI.
Based on AI large models, accurately recognizing and labeling real-world objects is a fundamental capability of V3X.
For example, when wearing V3X smart glasses, we can perform feature recognition on observed individuals and match them based on features and the user's social graph, helping users better identify their identities. Or when we see certain desired items, we can interact to let the glasses intelligently recognize the item and directly link to some sales channels for that product. Compared to the vast majority of similar products on the market, V3X ranks in the first tier in terms of experience and responsiveness.
Of course, V3X's greatest feature lies in its intelligent assistant attributes.
V3X can enhance user work efficiency through complete voice control, enabling smart notes, reminders, task automation, and even automating certain tasks. The device continuously optimizes its services as users use it, predicting, analyzing, learning, and adapting to user needs through advanced AI models, and providing personalized responses based on user preferences to further align with user habits, offering an ultra-personalized user experience.
Similarly, V3X also serves as an automated strategy tool for users' investments and an automated execution tool.
D3X itself is a next-generation artificial intelligence financial data analysis infrastructure that can provide real-time insights into all data indicators in the on-chain market, including on-chain transaction data, market sentiment (bullish, bearish), and sudden events, responding to market changes at millisecond speed. At the same time, D3X utilizes AI technology to collect information from different sources, conducting sentiment and technical analysis to establish personalized financial profiles. By analyzing users' trading history, behavior, and risk tolerance, D3X provides a customizable and automated personal financial assistant tailored to individual investment preferences, enabling traders to make informed decisions and improve trading efficiency.
Through integration with the D3X system, V3X smart glasses become a conduit for investors to connect with the system, allowing financial transactions to be executed through the glasses anytime and anywhere via V3X's interaction system. It is reported that the precise trading signals provided by the D3X system can achieve an accuracy rate of up to 82.7%, significantly enhancing the timeliness, accuracy, and convenience of financial investments.
Additional Profit Opportunities Brought by Web3
In fact, Web3 airdrops are becoming an important way for many ecosystems to achieve early launches, and for early contributing or interacting users, projects are expected to distribute token airdrops as rewards.
For example, Solana "Chapter 2" smartphone users have already received multiple high-quality meme token airdrops, with the airdrop value even covering the cost of purchasing the phone.
This inevitably leads us to wonder whether purchasing V3X smart glasses could also yield a series of airdrops, including tokens issued by V3X itself and a series of applications provided by dApps developed using V3X as a carrier. Meanwhile, V3X also supports users in interacting with different on-chain dApps through the glasses and can directly execute a series of on-chain transactions, making V3X an important entry point for exploring further profit capture in the Web3 ecosystem.
On the other hand, V3X itself is also based on the DePIN (Decentralized Infrastructure) solution to provide end-to-end data protection, ensuring privacy and user data control. In the long run, through further expansion of its business model, it may provide users with additional profit channels, such as helping users fully leverage data value in certain scenarios.
04 V3X May Drive the Smart Glasses Sector to Capture a Larger Market
From the perspective of intelligence alone, the application scenarios for AI glasses are quite broad.
As consumers pursue convenient and intelligent lifestyles, and as various industries demand intelligent solutions, the smart glasses market is expected to experience rapid growth. Particularly in fields such as entertainment, education, healthcare, and industry, the application potential of smart glasses is enormous.
With the integration of multimodal AI large models, the interaction mode of smart glasses has shifted from "hardware serving users" to "large models serving users," simplifying product design and enabling the device to achieve more functions with fewer hardware components.
Moreover, AI large models help glasses products achieve more efficient and streamlined human-computer interaction, enhancing user acceptance. Multimodal large models can understand various input methods such as voice and images, allowing users to interact with the device through voice, gestures, and other means. Therefore, in subsequent product function upgrades and iterations, model training upgrades will bear the learning costs for users regarding new features, thereby improving user acceptance.
Especially the new combination of V3X Web3 + AI is expected to further help the smart glasses market open up new horizons.
Compared to Meta's Orion, the V3X, which emphasizes intelligence, demonstrates advantages in multiple aspects.
In fact, for the alternative path of V3X, its potential audience shows a more flattened trend, targeting not just tech enthusiasts but further integrating with life, work, entertainment, and investment, making it more likely to endow smart glasses with more practical uses and further enhance their acceptance.
From the perspective of the wearable market valuation, it has currently reached $118 billion, while smart glasses, as a niche device, have consistently held a low proportion, which also indicates that this field still has significant development space. As V3X further enters the market, the smart glasses market is expected to welcome its singularity.