HANGZHOU – In China, artificial intelligence (AI) glasses let the wearer pay in shops with just a glance at a QR code and a voice command, as a growing number of companies look to conquer both growing domestic and overseas markets.

Interest in smart eyewear is soaring worldwide after more than a decade of stalled promise, with advances in artificial intelligence sparking a fresh boon for the sector.

US giant Meta is the clear market leader, but a host of Chinese companies – from behemoths like Alibaba and Xiaomi to start-ups like Rokid and XREAL – have their sights set on catching up.

“China’s advantages are self-evident,” Rokid chief executive Misa Zhu told AFP after a recent launch in the eastern city of Hangzhou.

“The ecosystem and its supply chain are all in China, and China produces a lot.”

Domestically, Chinese companies have an undeniable edge – Meta’s services are blocked there, inaccessible without a virtual private network.

The country is a potentially massive and lucrative market for wearable tech.

Smart glasses sales are expected to have grown 116 per cent there on-year in 2025, according to market intelligence provider IDC.

Daily life is already highly digitalised, with even older citizens using smartphones for everything from payments to transport.

China’s internet-based infrastructure, such as QR payment codes in shops, is “already more developed than in Europe and the United States”, said Mr Zhu.

Other Chinese companies like Xiaomi, RayNeo, Thunderobot and Kopin are active players in the smart glasses sector, wrote Ms Flora Tang, an analyst at research firm Counterpoint.

Xiaomi in particular was a “dark horse”, she said, its debut AI glasses the third best-selling of their kind for the first half of 2025 despite only being on sale for about a week.