Chinese technology giant, Baidu, has announced its own pair of AI-integrated smart glasses, showing its hand to US competitor, Meta.
Announced at the company’s annual World Conference event in Shanghai, the glasses are expected to ship next year.
Meta has pushed its smart glasses offerings, putting them on display at the company’s physical store in Burlingame, California alongside its VR headsets; and further signalled its commitment to this technology through a team-up with Ray-Ban.
China…Then the World
Baidu, though, is very much targeting the Chinese market initially with launch – a country where the Meta Ray-Ban glasses were not sold.
The Financial Times reports that the Baidu glasses are run on the company’s LLM, Ernie. The company has already used this to build a “virtual dashboard for families to help monitor elderly relatives, who can talk to AI doctors and receive reminders to take medication through a device,” says the newspaper.
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Li Ying, head of Baidu’s hardware brand Xiaodu, told crowds at the conference that the glasses would “become a private assistant,” providing wearers with information like their calorie consumption, play music for them and also be able to shoot videos.
A Competitor to Meta’s AI Glasses?
While the Baidu launch is focused upon China, this is an exciting development as it sees another technology company with global ambitions coming into this space.
The news comes swiftly after the unveiling of Meta’s Orion AR glasses – claimed by the company to be “the most advanced pair of AR glasses ever made.”
Meta says that their draw is that they look and feel like glasses – and not some hefty glasses-headset hybrid. “Orion is a feat of miniaturization – the components are packed down to a fraction of a millimeter. Dozens of innovations were required to get the design down to a contemporary form that you’d be comfortable wearing every day,” says Meta.
It adds that they have “the largest field of view in the smallest AR glasses form to date” to allow the real and digital worlds to merge seamlessly.
Meta’s Actual Product Won’t Arrive for a While
While this sounds very exciting, it is only Meta staff who will be getting their hands on Orion initially.
Orion won’t “make its way into the hands of consumers” as it is a “polished prototype,” shares meta, so we may be waiting a while to buy. Meta says, vaguely, “in the next few years, you can expect to see new devices from us that build on our R&D efforts.”
By then, Baidu may already have several iterations on the shelves in China; and could be eyeing the markets beyond.
