Samsung revealed the first details of its upcoming artificial intelligence-powered smart glasses. Jay Kim, executive vice president of the company's mobile business, confirmed to CNBC on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that the device will feature an integrated camera at the user's eye level and will be connected to a smartphone, which will be responsible for processing the information captured by the camera.
The launch is scheduled for this year and will represent Samsung's first foray into the smart glasses category. Kim was deliberately brief on additional details: he declined to confirm whether the device will have an integrated display, noting that Samsung already has other products like smartwatches or phones if the user needs a screen. The executive's stated goal is "to have something for the industry this year."
The timing of the launch is relevant. Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses dominate the market with 82% global share according to Counterpoint Research, but the space is attracting more and more competitors. Alibaba, Xreal and now Samsung are looking to challenge that dominance in a segment that device manufacturers consider the most likely candidate to become the next mass-market platform after the smartphone.
Samsung's bet does not start from scratch. Since 2023, the company has been working with Qualcomm and Google on the development of the operating system, semiconductors, and hardware for mixed reality technology. The first collaboration of that alliance was the Galaxy XR headset, launched last year on Google's Android XR operating system. Smart glasses are the natural next step for that architecture.
Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, also confirmed to CNBC that the glasses will arrive this year and explained his enthusiasm for the category in precise terms: glasses are close to the user's eyes, ears, and mouth, making them the ideal device for agentic experiences, where AI acts autonomously on behalf of the user without them having to interact with a screen. Amon compared the current state of smart glasses to the early years of the smartphone, when available apps were scarce, anticipating that the ecosystem's maturity will follow the same pattern of exponential growth.
Kim clarified the logic of the camera as the central piece of the device: the important thing is that the AI understands "where you are looking" to be able to "feed that information to the mobile, which processes it and gives you a lot of information." This flow, camera in the glasses to processing on the phone and response to the user, defines the interaction model that Samsung is building, different from completely autonomous devices like the Apple Vision Pro.
Kim was also clear about the future of the XR headset as a category: "I believe that XR in headset format will continue to exist, but not as a mass-scale business." Glasses, on the other hand, have an advantage due to their form factor: they are small, are already widely used, and do not generate the social friction of wearing a virtual reality helmet in public spaces.
From next+'s analysis, Samsung's entry into this market is a sign that the race for the next mass-market device with integrated AI now has more than two serious participants. Meta built an advantage with Ray-Ban because it arrived first and built an ecosystem with Llama and its AI infrastructure. Samsung arrives with the advantage of its global distribution scale, its alliance with Google and Qualcomm, and a portfolio of complementary devices that no other smart glasses manufacturer has integrated in the same way. What is at stake is how the AI ecosystem becomes the layer with which users interact naturally when they no longer need to take their phone out of their pocket.