Samsung’s booth features the prominent slogan “A new era of mobile artificial intelligence” from South Korean company Samsung Electronics.
Joan Cros | Nurfoto | fake images
Samsung’s next smart glasses will have a camera and be connected to a smartphone, a senior executive told CNBC, as the tech giant prepares to make its first foray into the product category.
Jay Kim, executive vice president of Samsung’s mobile business, teased some details about the 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 eye level.” The glasses will connect to your smartphone so that the phone can process the information received from the camera.
Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses dominate the smart glasses market with a global share of 82%, according to Counterpoint Research. But other players, from Alibaba to Xreal and now Samsung, are trying to challenge the American social media giant.
Samsung has been working with the chip designer Qualcomm and Google from 2023 to design the operating system, semiconductors and hardware around the so-called mixed reality technology. The term refers to the combination of augmented and virtual reality, often involving digital images that are imposed over the real world.
The first product of this partnership was the Galaxy Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told CNBC in 2024 that smart glasses were the ultimate goal.
Companies see smart glasses as potentially having greater appeal than other XR products because they are smaller and the glasses are already widely used.
“I think the XR in headphones will be available, but not as some kind of large-scale business,” Kim said.
“Everyone is talking about what the next AI device is going to be, and I know I’ve been looking at a lot of different types of devices. Glasses, obviously, are one of them and everyone is looking at it.”
The development of more advanced artificial intelligence applications such as Google Gemini or ChatGPT has fueled the push towards smart glasses.
Device makers are figuring out how users could interact with these services beyond writing an app on a separate device, such as speaking to an AI assistant in the glasses and the glasses’ camera as an input mode for the AI.
Kim added that what was “important” was for the AI to understand “where you’re looking” so it could “put the information into the mobile phone and then process it and actually give you a lot of information.”
Kim declined to say whether the glasses will have a built-in screen when asked, but said Samsung has other products like the smartwatch or phone if a user needs a screen.
Kim said Samsung’s goal is to “have something for the industry this year.”
Qualcomm’s Amon told CNBC earlier this week that smart glasses will launch this year.
Amon also explained why he was “optimistic” about smart glasses, saying that they were “close to our eyes, close to our ears, close to our mouth, we’re going to have those agentic experiences and workloads.”
“Agentic” refers to AI applications that can autonomously perform tasks on behalf of users. Device makers have talked about a world in which users will be able to ask their artificial intelligence agents to call a taxi or book a hotel.
Things that users once did on their phones and laptops will move to other devices like 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 will see those glasses improve over time as new agents are developed,” Amon said.
