Source: Geek Park
Author: Zhang Yongyi
After the release of the XIAOMI-W glasses, AI glasses have truly entered the 'deep water zone.'
The XIAOMI-W AI glasses unexpectedly 'sell out.'
根据 $XIAOMI-W (01810.HK)$ Data from the official account's device activation statistics show that as of July 2, 2025, the actual user activation number of XIAOMI-W AI glasses has surpassed 30,000 units. This figure, distinct from the vague shipment or sales volume, directly reflects the real user scale that has already received the product and started using it, making it one of the most important active user Indicators in hardware sales.
This achievement marks that after the numerous Venture's trials and market explorations, China's AI glasses sector has finally welcomed the entry of a heavyweight player, and through powerful brand influence, is spreading the Concept of AI glasses to more ordinary digital users.
This strong momentum has triggered intense ripples in the AI glasses Industry in China. If the previous smart glasses were a "shallow game" for a few geeks and pioneers, then XIAOMI's entry has brought the entire Industry into a "deep water zone" full of variables and opportunities.
01. Why XIAOMI?
XIAOMI's success is not coincidental; behind it lies the exploration, trial and error, and expectations of the entire Industry over the past year.
In the Chinese AI glasses market, the most typical negative case is the heavily anticipated Shanjiji.
As a new brand known for design and "anti-cost performance" in the digital accessory field, Shanjiji once seized the opportunity, attempting to create a domestic version of Ray-Ban Meta. The functional blueprint outlined by Shanjiji's glasses—AI, photography, memory, recall, and a "co-creation price" of 999 yuan—once excited the market.
However, a huge engineering gap lies between ideals and reality. From the pre-sale in May 2024 to the first shipments in January 2025, the lengthy 7-month wait dulled users' initial enthusiasm. Moreover, the actual products exposed a series of issues: some users reported that "the dual side arms were asymmetrical upon arrival, and the arm paint was flaking," and others experienced fatal flaws of being unable to power on or charging within a month.
As a pair of camera glasses, its core shooting function has also been criticized, with users describing the image quality as "retro style from the millennium," suffering from serious color noise, color偏差, and blurriness. The promised features at the launch event, such as video replay and Bluetooth calling, also failed to go live as scheduled.
An executive from the Alibaba Tongyi Large Model team once revealed that the Flash team’s understanding of AI remains at the level of "just integrating an API," severely underestimating the difficulty of integrating the model into the glasses.
Mistakes in hardware selection further compounded the product's issues. Flash equipped the camera glasses with the W517 smartwatch chip released by UNISOC in 2020, trying to support a smart glasses device that requires longer battery life, lighter weight, and the integration of various large models with a chip designed for a watch, highlighting the difficulty of calibration.
The predicament faced by Flash is a microcosm of the huge challenges encountered by the entire AI glasses hardware industry from 0 to 1—it exposes the shortcomings of venture companies in supply chain integration, quality control, software tuning, and engineering capabilities.
In this context, Xiaomi, as a mature hardware giant that ships over a hundred million devices annually, has its advantages magnified. The strong bargaining power of its supply chain, deep hardware engineering experience, mature quality control system, and a well-rounded software development team together form the foundation for the success of Xiaomi's AI glasses.
It does not need to explore in the dark like venture companies; instead, it takes a well-validated path and uses the methods most adept for hardware companies to create a product that is of higher completeness and more stable experience.
02, Product Choices and Redefinitions.
Although Xiaomi's AI glasses are positioned as "personal intelligent devices for the next era," the product itself does not seem "futuristic," and has even been described by many XR media as "lackluster."
The Xiaomi AI glasses weigh approximately 40g and feature a classic D-shaped frame design. The company claims they are "optimized for Asian facial features," making them comfortable to wear without causing noticeable pressure. Although some reviews suggest that the frame and temples appear bulkier compared to the more stylishly designed Ray-Ban Meta, Xiaomi has maximized the fashion attributes needed for daily wear by offering various color options, including classic black, semi-transparent tortoise brown, and parrot green, as well as supporting an omnichannel lens fitting service.
The biggest design highlight of the hardware is undoubtedly the launch of the "electrochromic" version. Users can adjust the lens color in multiple stages within 0.2 seconds by swiping their fingers across the temples. Although this feature sometimes requires multiple adjustments to work successfully and incurs an additional premium of 700 to 1000 yuan (the founder of Angry Meow Technology, Li Nan, once remarked, "If this technology really wants to be popularized, it cannot exploit consumers in this way"), it still attracts a large volume of orders due to its impressive technological appeal, with "arrival notifications" currently displayed on multiple e-commerce platforms.
The first-person perspective (POV) shooting is currently the core application scenario for AI glasses. Xiaomi chose to break through by offering a higher resolution; its landscape videos surpass the clarity and aspect ratio of the upright format of Ray-Ban Meta, and better align with viewing habits on mainstream platforms.
However, this pursuit of picture quality seems to sacrifice some stability. In dynamic scenes, the image trailing of Xiaomi glasses is more pronounced compared to the excellent anti-shake performance of Ray-Ban Meta. In terms of interaction, both provide quick control methods, but the subtle differences reflect different polishing philosophies. Xiaomi achieves quick shots in 0.8 seconds with physical buttons, but lacks a command for stopping recording with voice control, necessitating manual operation.
In contrast, Ray-Ban Meta's voice interaction is more complete, supporting full voice control for start and stop, providing a more immersive "hands-free" experience.
Furthermore, as the soul of the product experience, the path to implementing AI directly determines the core of user experience. Xiaomi and Meta have chosen two completely different technical routes.
$Meta Platforms (META.US)$ The choice to embed AI models on the device side has achieved almost zero latency for rapid responses. However, for Chinese users, internet restrictions make its core multimodal Meta AI features unavailable in mainland China.
Currently, XIAOMI-W has chosen a more pragmatic "cloud" route for its AI glasses, completely binding its AI capabilities to the Xiao Ai assistant on smartphones.
The advantage of this approach lies in the ability to call upon powerful cloud computing resources, thus enabling complex and highly localized practical functions such as meeting minutes transcription and multilingual simultaneous interpretation. But the cost is that each interaction relies on the smartphone's Bluetooth connection, which brings about a delay of approximately two seconds.
03. The Battle of Glasses and the Ambitions of Giants
XIAOMI-W's entry is not just about launching a product; it sends a clear signal to the entire Industry: the era of AI glasses has truly begun.
The success of Ray-Ban Meta provides a model and target for all later entrants. Its sales have surpassed 2 million units, and partner EssilorLuxottica plans to raise its annual production capacity to 10 million units by the end of 2026. This success comes from the perfect combination of Meta's technology and Ray-Ban's classic design, along with EssilorLuxottica's strong offline channels around the globe.
The collaboration between Meta and Essilor proves that as long as design, wearability, and core functional issues are solved, consumers are willing to pay for AI glasses.
Meta's ambitions go beyond this. It plans to launch more co-branded models based on its brands like Oakley, and gradually develop Ray-Ban Meta into an open platform that allows third-party developers to create applications for it.
Zuckerberg called in an internal meeting: "We have essentially created this category, competitors have not really entered the market yet, but they will eventually come... Now is an excellent time for us to push forward at full speed."
However, domestically, XIAOMI faces a battlefield that is poised to take off, but where user acceptance is relatively lower. In addition to the previously mentioned Flash, the V3 AI glasses innovatively launched by Thunderbird focus on 4K shooting and a super lightweight of 39g; Rokid Glasses have repeatedly gained attention on Social Media for their display features and have also borne a significant share of educational market costs in the early stages.
In addition to the products themselves, a collaboration regarding design and channels has long been underway, with traditional eyewear giants such as Doctorglasses Chain and Treasure Island Glasses partnering with technology brands like Thunderbird, Huawei, and Meizu to try to seize offline entry points.
Moreover, as a de facto popularizer, XIAOMI AI glasses still play an educational role in many places: many consumers ask when experiencing the XIAOMI AI glasses: "Why can't subtitles be displayed directly on the lens?"
This reflects a watershed moment in the AI glasses Industry at the current technological stage: true AR glasses need to achieve high brightness information display on thin lenses and rely on a low-power chip for real-time computing. Even the XIAOMI AI glasses that currently use self-developed chips have not adopted this design in the current trial phase.
Neil Shah, the vice president of Counterpoint Research, pointed out that the most challenging part of AR glasses is the display module, which accounts for 60% of the total system power consumption, and the computing chip, which accounts for 30%. At the end of June this year, Luo Yonghao, after diving into the AR field and burning through a lot of funds, also admitted at the AGI Playground conference held by Geek Park that it is unlikely for AR glasses to achieve ideal commercialization within the next decade.
Therefore, both XIAOMI and Meta have pragmatically chosen the form of "glasses + camera + audio + AI" as a transitional phase towards ultimate AR glasses. This represents both a technological compromise and a wise commercial choice.
With Xiaomi's brand power, the Concept of AI glasses has quickly permeated from the Technology circle into the mass consumer market. The activation of thirty thousand units means there are thirty thousand active seed users who are promoting awareness and interest in this new category through Social Media sharing and word-of-mouth.
A product from a giant that can be shipped at scale provides clear demand and direction for upstream suppliers. Whether it's the electrochromic lens technology, microcamera modules, or special hinges and low-power chips, there are now mass production goals to strive for and iterate upon. A stable and healthy Industry Chain ecosystem is accelerating around these leading products.
Xiaomi's successful entry will undoubtedly stimulate more Technology and Internet giants to accelerate the launch of their own products. It is foreseeable that soon, competing products from companies like Baidu and ByteDance will begin to emerge. The AI Smart Glasses market in the second half of 2025 will officially enter a fierce competitive landscape, transitioning from the scattered beginnings sparked by Ventures.
04. The Long Journey to the 'Next iPhone'
The performance of Xiaomi's AI glasses will determine whether it can seize the initiative in the Chinese market. At least from the current first sales figures, Xiaomi AI glasses, as one of the earliest and most anticipated entrants among the big players, have already captured crucial advantages.
However, it is far from the finish line in this race: In the long term, the ultimate goal of AI glasses is still to become the next generation personal computing platform after Smart Phones. The road ahead is challenging, needing to overcome countless technological hurdles such as display, power consumption, interaction, and ecology. But the robust sales of Xiaomi's AI glasses prove that the door has already been pushed open, and the market is ready for transformation.
In this race no one wants to miss, towards the 'next iPhone', following Meta's path, Xiaomi has already seen the first bend ahead.
Editor/rice
