Samsung reveals first details of AI smart glasses to launch 2026
The Samsung exhibition stand features the prominent slogan of the South Korean company Samsung Electronics, “A new era in mobile agent artificial intelligence.”
Joan Cros | Nurfoto | Getty Images
Samsung’s upcoming smart glasses will have a camera and connect to a smartphone, a senior executive told CNBC, as the tech giant prepares to make its first foray into the product category.
Jay Kim, vice president of Samsung’s mobile business, revealed some details about smart glasses for the first time on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona.
Kim told CNBC that the smart glasses will have a built-in camera “at your eye level.” The glasses will be connected to your smartphone so that the handset can process the information received from the camera.
According to Counterpoint Research, Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses dominate the smart glasses market with a global share of 82%. But other players, from Alibaba to Xreal and now Samsung, are trying to challenge the US social media giant.
Samsung works with chip designer Qualcomm and since 2023, Google has been working to design the operating system, semiconductors, and hardware around what is called mixed reality technology. This term refers to the combination of augmented reality and virtual reality, which often involves digital images imposed on the real world.
The first product from this partnership was the Galaxy XR headset, which went on sale last year and is based on Google’s Android “XR” operating system, an umbrella term for VR and mixed and augmented reality operating system. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told CNBC in 2024 that smart glasses are the ultimate goal.
The companies think smart glasses have potentially greater appeal than other XR products because they are smaller and the glasses are already so widely used.
“I think XR in headphones will be around in some form. But not as a mass-scale business,” Kim said.
“Everyone’s talking about what the next AI device will be, and I know I’ve looked at a lot of different types of devices. Glasses, of course, are one of them, and everyone’s looking at it.”
The development of more advanced AI applications such as Google Gemini or ChatGPT has accelerated the move towards smart glasses.
Device makers are trying to figure out how users can interact with these services beyond writing an app on a separate device, such as talking to a glasses-wearing AI assistant and having the glasses’ camera be an input mode for the AI.
Kim added that “the important thing” is for the AI to understand “where you’re looking” so it can “feed the information into the mobile phone, which then processes it and gives you a lot of information.”
When asked, Kim declined to say whether the glasses would have a built-in screen, but said Samsung has other products, such as a smartwatch or phone, in case the user needs a screen.
Kim said Samsung’s goal is to “achieve something for the industry this year.”
Qualcomm’s Amon told CNBC earlier this week that smart glasses will be released this year.
Amon also explained why he’s “bullish” on smart glasses, saying glasses are “close to our eyes, close to our ears, close to our mouths, we’re going to have these agency experiences and workloads.”
“Ajantic” refers to AI applications that can autonomously execute tasks on behalf of users. Device makers have talked about a world where users could ask AI agents to call a taxi or book a hotel.
Things users once did on their phones and laptops will shift to other devices, such as smart glasses, Amon said.
He compared the current state of smart glasses to the early days of smartphones, when there were far fewer apps available.
“But then you go to 200 applications, 1,000 applications, and that’s how we’ll see these glasses get better over time as new agents are developed,” Amon said.
