{"id":14183,"date":"2025-07-16T16:42:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T16:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/14183\/"},"modified":"2025-07-16T16:42:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T16:42:07","slug":"chinas-wild-world-of-ar-glasses-has-me-convinced-meta-is-cooked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/14183\/","title":{"rendered":"China\u2019s Wild World of AR Glasses Has Me Convinced Meta Is Cooked"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know I\u2019ve said it 1,000 times, but AR glasses are hot right now, and arguably no one is more on fire than China. While the U.S. is patiently waiting for Meta to release anything even resembling its prototype AR glasses, Orion<\/a>, China seems to be making strides day by day. The latest example? These glasses with full-color optical waveguide lenses and 900 nits of brightness from a Chinese company called Wigain<\/a>. In plain speak, they\u2019re full-color AR glasses with enough brightness to actually use outdoors in the real world. And the kicker here is that Wigain says they\u2019re actually \u201cmass-producible.\u201d<\/p>\n

The way Wigain talks about its glasses, they sound an awful lot like the Orion-based glasses Meta is slating for 2027, except they\u2019re actually a real thing you can buy right now, or at least pre-order. Wigain says its AR glasses, called Omnision<\/a>, have a 50-degree field of view, use Sony\u2019s micro-OLED screens, and have an 800p resolution with a full-color display. They\u2019re powered by Qualcomm XR2 Gen 1, too, which should make them fairly snappy. If you want more power, there\u2019s also a Wi-Fi 7-enabled \u201cstation\u201d that uses Gen 2 of the same Qualcomm chip. Wigain is claiming six hours of battery life\u2014fairly solid for glasses that claim to do this much. Looks-wise, they leave something to be desired, but Wigain did manage to get the glasses down to a serviceable weight of 120 grams.<\/p>\n

\"Wigain\u00a9 Wigain <\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong, I\u2019m skeptical of Wigain\u2019s claims here, but the fact that it recently demoed the glasses in real life at an Expo in Osaka, Japan<\/a>, and they have a real launch date and pre-orders is forcing me to take the Omnison glasses seriously. There\u2019s also the fact that Wigain doesn\u2019t seem to be alone in its success with pushing the ball forward on XR. China\u2019s Xiaomi, as I recently covered<\/a>, just unveiled a pair of XR glasses that pretty much kick the Meta Ray-Bans\u2019 ass<\/a>. They aren\u2019t AR glasses, to be sure, but they double the Ray-Bans\u2019 battery life, are capable of first-person video calling, and can allegedly record video for 45 minutes as opposed to the Ray-Bans\u2019 three minutes, and they even have a mobile payment feature that uses QR codes and voice verification. Oh, and they cost about the same as Meta\u2019s competitor.<\/p>\n

Listen, I\u2019m not a market analyst or anything, but if I were a betting man and you asked me to wager which country\u2019s AR glasses are going to actually succeed from a technical standpoint, I\u2019m going with China all the way here. And as someone who\u2019s been covering technology for a while now, that story is as old as time\u2014and not just relegated to XR glasses. EVs in China, for example, are not just incredibly cheap<\/a>, but also arguably more advanced than the ones sold here in the U.S. On paper, Chinese automakers like BYD are winning by a mile, though the U.S. market is obviously a whole separate entity for political reasons, and vice versa. Either way, I, as a consumer, am once again on the other side of the coin, stateside, wishing that U.S. companies would take some cues from their Chinese counterparts. Because, damn, Wigain\u2014if its glasses are the real deal\u2014just beat Meta\u2019s Orion to the punch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I know I\u2019ve said it 1,000 times, but AR glasses are hot right now, and arguably no one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14184,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[13653,1282,13654,74,179,509,180],"class_list":{"0":"post-14183","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-virtual-reality","8":"tag-ar-glasses","9":"tag-meta","10":"tag-meta-ray-bans","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-virtual-reality","13":"tag-virtualreality","14":"tag-vr"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}