Artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) are steadily becoming integral parts of our lives. However, as we’ve seen with devices like Humane and Rabbit, early attempts have often faltered due to mismatched form factors. This year, Meta demonstrated a breakthrough by showcasing their vision with Meta Orion and the hugely successful Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, suggesting society may now be ready to embrace this next generation of consumer devices, AI AR Glasses!
Meta isn’t alone in this vision. As we just wrapped up CES 2025, we’ll explore the strategies of key players and their announcements. Let’s dive into the trends, innovations, and devices shaping the future of AI and AR in 2025.
In the early days of AR, devices like Google Glass struggled to find acceptance. Today, however, companies like Nvidia and Google are doubling down on AR by filing patents to address a critical bottleneck: waveguides. Nvidia’s innovations focus on improving occlusion, while Google’s tackle light efficiency in multilayered waveguides. Both are key to advancing AR optics and enabling devices like Meta’s Orion and Snap’s Spectacles 5.
This signals that the AI arms race is now unfolding in the XR domain, with CES 2025 set as the battleground for unveiling groundbreaking solutions.
CES 2025 promises a showcase of AR AI Glasses, cutting-edge devices and components. To provide clarity, here’s a breakdown of devices by their immersion level, categorized by Degrees of Freedom (DoF):
Waveguides
The three fundamental distinctions in optic systems coming to headsets are waveguides, birdbaths, and near-eye displays. These systems already existed but many things have been improved. Generally speaking, you can link the type of optics to the application. Simple waveguides will be used in AR glasses with low DoF, for navigation, notifications, live translation, etc. Birdbaths will be used for showing more detailed content like videos, and screen mirroring, so will be mostly used for entertainment and productivity. 6DoF glasses are now equipped with advanced waveguides, which will be mostly used for all purposes + gaming.
In simplified terms, waveguides are very thin layers with numerous minor points that reflect or refract light beams from an optic engine toward the eye. This technology, used in Meta’s Orion and Snap’s latest Spectacles, features advanced multilayered and grated waveguides. These systems demand high computational power and energy to function effectively.
Simple, lightweight waveguides are expected to feature prominently in Level 2 HUD smart glasses. The primary challenge is to achieve a wide field-of-view (FoV) while keeping the overall weight low and maintaining brightness and color quality.
Birdbaths
Birdbath optics employ small, see-through concave mirrors to project light. They deliver bright and vivid colors, making them ideal for video and image display. Most birdbath systems rely on tethered pucks, "an external device connected via cable” for graphic processing, a necessity that adds bulk and detracts from the glasses' fashionability.
Birdbath systems make occlusion of digital objects more challenging, which may limit their utility in AR applications. The focus of key players like Nvidia, Google, Meta, and Snap on waveguide technology suggests the industry’s preference for this approach.
Despite these challenges, two birdbath-based devices stand out: TCL’s RayNeo X3 Pro, promising exceptional color vibrancy, and XReal’s One Pro, which boasts the broadest diagonal FoV of 57 degrees. Both aim to replace desktop monitors, as the primary use case. With big screens as usecase, occlusions is less of a concern.
Near-Eye Displays
New players like Halliday are experimenting with near-eye displays. Their glasses from Gyges Lab prioritize discretion, making them ideal for scenarios like job interviews or exams where traditional AR devices might seem intrusive.
Textual AI
Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses integrate basic AI assistants for voice-activated queries and contextual information. After triggering Meta AI with a voice command, users can ask questions or inquire about objects they see, similar to basic ChatGPT functionalities.
However, this interaction is entirely hands-free, making it more convenient than pulling out a phone. All smart glasses are expected to adopt this form of low-latency AI assistant that relies on an internet connection.
Proactive AI
Halliday’s glasses introduce Proactive AI, an advanced system that listens and provides real-time suggestions or teleprompts. Imagine having a virtual assistant whispering witty comebacks or insights directly into your ear—or, in this case, displaying them discreetly in your field of vision. This type of AI could transform live translations and presentations, though it is likely to spark debates about privacy and ethical use.
In addition to Proactive AI, Halliday’s device includes teleprompting and live translation capabilities. Teleprompting can benefit users during presentations by showing scripts as they speak, while live translation ensures seamless communication in multilingual settings.
These features are processed via a connected phone, highlighting the device’s lightweight yet powerful design.
Computer Vision
Most AI functionalities on smart glasses are offloaded to connected phones due to limited on-device computing power. However, Rokid’s glasses stand out for their ability to run object detection models directly on the device. These glasses also recognize head movements, translating nods or gestures into inputs, and feature voiceprint recognition for secure payments. These models, developed by Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen), demonstrate the potential of on-device AI in compact hardware.
More advanced 3DoF devices with better cameras are expected to expand computer vision capabilities. XReal’s upcoming modular camera, the XReal Eye, hints at future multimodal AI applications.
Developers will soon gain access to the camera feed, enabling experiments with object recognition, gesture tracking, and other innovative use cases.
Multimodal AI
Multimodal AI combines multiple AI models in a pipeline to deliver complex functionalities. For example, a calorie-tracking application could use Proactive AI to detect eating sounds, trigger an object detection model to identify food items, and then estimate calories using another model. While simplified, this example illustrates how interconnected AI systems can create transformative AR applications. The key to unluck Multimodel AI is camera acces, which has been protected because of privacy concerns. However, last year at Meta Connect, Meta announced that they will release a camera feed API that will give us more abilities. Meta is following Snap Spectacles experimental API and Apple Vision Pro with their own enterprise camera access API.
Snap’s Spectacles 5 already provides tools for developers to prototype such applications. One inspiring example is @_xulipa’s calorie tracker, built using Snap’s platform. For further inspiration, check out the work of Stijn Spanhove (@stspanho) and Lukas Moro (@lukas_moro) on X.
AI Agents
The next frontier in AI is the development of autonomous agents. These systems are prompted with tasks and execute a series of actions to achieve the desired outcome. For instance, a user might ask an agent to “Order new coffee pads,” requiring the AI to identify the user’s preferences, navigate an e-commerce platform, and place the order. While such agents are not yet standard on AR smart glasses, companies like Rokid are already exploring voice recognition and payment integration, signaling that AI agents are on the horizon. The idea of agents is that they will work semi-autonomously for you, if you want to see how this could look like, check out this post from Stijn Spanhove.
The developer landscape for AR is rapidly evolving, fueled by new platforms like AndroidXR. Companies like Meta, Google, and Snap are offering improved SDKs and tools to empower creators. Below is a comparison of the leading developer ecosystems:
Platform
Focus Areas
Key Tools
Coding Languages
Custom ML Support
Tutorials & Learning
Meta SDK
VR/AR apps, hand tracking
Unity, Unreal, Meta SDK, Spatial SDK
C#, C++, Visual coding
Unity Sentis
Excellent
Lens Studio
AR lenses, ML filters
Lens Studio, SnapML
TypeScript, JavaScript
Easy
Good
XReal NRSDK
AR, entertainment, education
Unity, NRSDK
C#
Modular AI camera
Good
Rokid SDK
Industrial AR, voice interaction
Android Studio, RokidSDK
C#, Python, Java
Unknown
Limited
TCL RayNeo
Entertainment
TCL developer program
C#, Kotlin
Likely
Active Discord
We asked experts in the field of AR to share their expectations and vision for the future of AR / AI glasses. They shared valuable insights on how to find opportunities to create apps and content in a fast-evolving landscape.
Anshel Sag - Principal Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategies, Contributor at Forbes, UploadVR, RCRWireless:
I think that people have to remember that XR is a spectrum and that we’ll have many types of glasses and AIs that go with them. AI could help bridge the gap across different hardware platforms, but I believe that there is no denial that AI and XR are both complementary technologies. In the long term, we won’t be able to separate AI from XR and it will be fundamental to XR. After all, we’ve all agreed that typing in VR or AR is not a particularly good experience and things like gestures and voice commands are far more engaging and easier to use. Developers should consider the compute that will be on AR glasses in the future and the modalities we will experience ranging from cloud, to hybrid and even local AI. I believe that in the long term we will eventually see another category of glasses that mostly depend on 5G and the cloud for compute, but that future is still quite a ways away. In the meantime, thinking about compute performance, limited battery capacity and how important efficiency is for these wearable categories will be paramount.
Thomas Suarez - Founder Raven Resonance (AR glasses for all-day wear)
The future of augmented reality includes a variety of devices and software applications, spanning various levels of immersion. We will likely see optically-transparent AR glasses, alongside more passthrough headsets like Vision Pro or Meta Quest and their smaller counterparts. Currently, developing for passthrough headsets using the Unity game engine is perhaps the closest representation of long-term spatial computing to which developers have access today.
Head-up displays are well-positioned to bridge the gap between society's current focus on smartphones, and a fully spatial AR future. To paraphrase Escher Reality founder and former Niantic executive Ross Finman, "in order to build the iPhone of AR, someone must first build the iPod."
If someone wants to build a smartphone, there is a clear path for a new entrant in that industry to choose components, build software, and begin manufacturing, since the underlying interaction paradigm for mobile computing is well-defined and widely understood. However, AR is still nascent and relatively few design patterns are confirmed to work in headworn displays. Design decisions that come from personal experiences, testing and wearing AR glasses daily, tend to be distinct from decisions made for a smartphone or smartwatch.
Currently, application ecosystems are fragmented across game engines, operating systems, and even within the same environment on the device. For example, the state of 3D applications made in Unity for most VR devices does not automatically synchronize over a network and cannot seamlessly interact with other applications on the same device, as would be expected on a desktop with a modern window manager. Similarly, head-up display based AR devices are typically tethered to a phone for operation over Bluetooth. Information and state do not seamlessly flow between applications, and refresh times for graphics are slow since they are often not computed on the device itself.
Dogfooding prototypes, whether using software built by a developer on an AR/VR platform or testing the AR/VR device itself, is important to understand first-hand what it is like to wear and use these products on a regular basis. AR/VR hardware and software work together to create more intimate audiovisual experiences than any other platform can deliver. These are not the type of interactions that can be theorized; they must be felt.
Norman M. - AR News and Community Admin: r/AugmentedReality
Some very smart advice that I came across a few years ago was: If you want to make money in AR then create filters for social media. I realized that full AR glasses still need some time. And to know when to make bets on them would require to look into the tech that will enable a form factor many people will find attractive.
Seven or eight years later, I believe that new opportunities will arise over the next few years. And these will be in apps for smart glasses with a relatively small field of view and without full AR capabilities. Expect something like Ray-Ban Meta with a small full color display getting more and more popular until the end of the 2020s - for consumer and for business. And expect it to work together with phones as the main device and with wristbands as another input device. The big driving factor now, of course, is AI. It makes glasses more useful, apps more customizable and adaptable. And these new devices close to our eyes, ears, and hands will generate new data that is necessary to train even more useful AI.
To build a useful app for glasses requires analyzing what people do all day, identifying stressful situations in which it is inconvenient to grab the phone. Some mobile app features might be more suitable for glasses and can be brought over. Other situations might not have a mobile app solution yet because the phone has always been unsuitable.
When you have thought of a solution for glasses, it might not be enough for a successful app and you might need to build more features so that it is helpful often enough to use it regularly. Maybe a user will prefer to use some features with a phone and only one or a few with glasses. While at home, the phone might be the preferred device whereas glasses might work better on the go.
Being able to use the same app across different devices could be an important factor for the success of an app. These cross-device apps could even replace established mobile apps that were built for phones only. These things and how the platforms help to make the app discoverable are some aspects you need to think about.
If you already have an idea for an app you want to build.
Okay, so you want to become an AR developer and already have an interesting use case in mind?
First, you have to find out which type of device would be most fitting. Do you need 6DoF or is a waveguide HUD display enough? Remember that the user wants as little friction as possible.
Now the second important thing is to learn fast and iterate. Make a product for a device that you can buy and use yourself. As Tom mentioned dogfood prototyping is important, use yourself as a test case. Choose a product that has an active developer ecosystem to learn fast. If you are familiar with javascript or typescript, build for Snapchat in Lens studio. If you know C# pick a device that is compatible with Unity.
So to summarize, answer these questions:
But what if I don’t have a use case, and I just want to learn?
In this case it would be wise to get to know the most universal platform so you can follow tutorials on any topic that you find interesting. You will learn skills that are applicable everywhere. If you have patience and enough interest, Unity is the way. It’s always important that depending on the level of skill you have, you should pick an ecosystem where there are a lot of other people learning, this will increase your pace because many questions that you will have are already answered.
Ecosystems ranked by estimated development activity:
Broad Resources:
Documentation:
AI resources:
Funding / Hackathons:
With AI and AR converging rapidly, CES 2025 showcased how these technologies reshape consumer devices and developer tools. The possibilities are endless, from improved optics to Proactive AI and expanded developer ecosystems.
Which AR innovation are you most excited to see at CES 2025? Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to explore the developer ecosystems to start creating your own AR solutions!
