Chinese augmented reality (AR) start-up Rokid has a new pair of lightweight smart glasses that it says will allow it to go head-to-head with Meta Platforms, as it eyes profitability in 2025.
The Hangzhou-based company, founded by former Alibaba Group Holding employee Misa Zhu Mingming, on Monday announced the Rokid Glasses, its first AR glasses equipped with large language models (LLMs) – the technology that underpins intelligent chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The glasses use Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen family of LLMs, marking the start-up’s best effort yet to crack the consumer market, Zhu told the South China Morning Post. Alibaba owns the Post.
With the new product, Rokid is entering the smart glasses market amid an explosion of fresh interest stemming from new capabilities introduced by generative AI. Facebook owner Meta has been one of the biggest beneficiaries with a smart glasses line it created with Ray-Ban.
In September, Meta also teased “the most advanced pair of AR glasses ever made”, called Orion, but it said they are currently too expensive to mass produce for consumers. Those glasses are completely self-contained computers. Many lower-cost AR glasses, including earlier pairs made by Rokid, mirror the image from another device like a smartphone, connected via USB-C.
