If you’ve never been to Shenzhen, China’s electronics capital, the annual CES trade show in Las Vegas is the next best thing. I’m reporting this week from the sprawling event, surrounded by fancy, strange, and often unnecessary gadgets, and despite my sore legs, I’ve barely scratched the surface.
There are at least 900 Chinese tech companies attending CES this year, almost a quarter of the total exhibitors, according to an analysis of the conference’s exhibitor directory. I even saw two Chinese humanoid robots at different booths dancing to the same viral Chinese rap song five minutes apart.
But at CES, Chinese companies are showing off far more than just gadgets; also on display are artificial intelligence software, electric vehicles, self-driving technology, and more. Today, I’m sharing the four most important trends I’ve seen at CES, from the rise of Chinese smart glasses to the quiet adoption of generative AI video tools.
Seeing Is Believing
Meta has sold over 2 million pairs of its Ray-Ban smart glasses, but the tech giant just announced it’s delaying their global rollout. Chinese AI companies, meanwhile, are taking the product category into overdrive. At CES, there are at least three dozen Chinese AI eyewear products on display this year.
One of the most promising brands in this space is Rokid, a Hangzhou-based company that has been making VR and AR glasses since 2018. AR glasses are particularly promising, because they are one of the least invasive gadgets to wear for long periods of time, says Zoro Shao, Rokid’s global general manager. Shao says the ideal pair should weigh less than 50 grams, have full-color display, need to be charged only once a day, and retail for less than $500.
But Shao says smart glasses are still fairly niche, and mass adoption remains far away. “Chinese electric vehicles became unstoppable once they accounted for 5 percent of the total car market in China; now they’re almost 50 percent of the market,” Shao says. Cumulative sales of Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, in contrast, represent less than 1 percent of the US population.
I tried out Rokid’s flagship glasses, which project a tiny screen in the center of your field of vision that can display GPS directions, AI chatbot conversations, language translations, and a teleprompter. For now, everything is displayed in a single color—green. I was impressed how the glasses could be adapted to my eyesight (I’m quite nearsighted, and smart goggles are usually a pain for me to try). You can insert a pair of prescription lenses into Rokid’s glasses, a process that only took a few seconds. They also have a real-time translation tool, which records the other speaker’s voice, runs it through AI models from Alibaba or Microsoft, and then presents the translation in real time on the same tiny screen. It worked surprisingly well when I tested it, but it’s still awkward to be reading text on a screen when there’s a human standing there talking directly to you.
Speaking of Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant was also at CES showing off its own new smart glasses, which were released in November. But it had a tiny booth on the edge of one exhibition hall, and the only employee who had the glasses wasn't there when I arrived. Alibaba declined to tell me how well the glasses are selling, but a company representative says it plans to offer them outside of China soon.
I also spoke with a Chinese company called Appotronics, which makes the tiny laser projectors that enable on-lens displays in smart glasses. The smallest model they showed me is about the size of a Lego brick, can display full color on the lenses, and is inexpensive to manufacture.