Rokid virtual screen vs. Meta Ray-Ban Display

Hi, this is Evelyn, writing to you from Beijing. Welcome to the latest edition of The China Connection — a succinct snapshot of what I’m seeing and hearing from local businesses.

Today, I talk to a smart glasses exec about why price-conscious Chinese consumers are paying $100 more for AI frames. What’s his strategy for taking on Meta’s Ray-Ban Display outside China?

While smart-glasses wearers in the U.S. got a small corner screen with the release of the Meta Ray-Ban Display, here in China, two companies are selling smart frames with a virtual display that sits right in front of the user.

At the top of China’s sales rankings is Rokid. Despite a price tag about $100 higher than its closest rival Alibaba, Rokid’s AI-powered frames have held first place for the past three months, according to online electronics retailer JD.com. That’s a big deal in budget-conscious China.

One of Rokid’s most popular features is a virtual screen that scrolls through the text of a prepared speech during a presentation. It’s popular with company executives and government officials, Gary Cai, vice president of the company, told me.

“A lot of people buy our glasses for this teleprompting capability,” he said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC.

Rokid is ramping up sales globally — it held 3.9% market share last year — while Alibaba also plans an overseas rollout after showing off its smart glasses at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year. Meanwhile, Meta says it has delayed the overseas release of the Ray-Ban Display due to inventory constraints and “unprecedented” U.S. demand.

Rokid currently ships its AI display glasses to countries including the U.K. and Canada, according to its website — but not the U.S. The frames retail outside China for $599; that’s less than the Meta Ray-Ban Display, which starts at $799 but is not officially sold in China, where a firewall blocks access to Facebook.

The global AI glasses market is expected to grow by more than 70% this year to 15 million unit sales, according to Omdia, which predicts Chinese sales will double to 2.1 million frames.

But AI glasses with virtual displays are still niche — expected to grow only modestly to account for just 10% of global sales, according to Jason Low, Shanghai-based research director for connected life at Omdia.

He noted that in China, however, despite some “rudimentary” displays, consumers prefer them because they want to interact with their devices in this way.

Technically, Rokid and Alibaba use augmented reality technology to display green-colored text and some images with their glasses, while Meta offers a colored screen. And the fact that Meta’s frames are Ray-Ban certainly makes them fashionable.

But in China, Rokid users on social media say they like the central display because it makes navigation easy when riding a bike, for example, and it allows them to order a coffee by talking while walking.

This spring, Rokid integrated AI agent OpenClaw into its frames,…