The voice was calm, yet the effect was instant. "Xiaohuan, Xiaohuan, capture the scene in front of me," said Yang Wen'an, and the moment was frozen — snapped and saved by the pair of artificial intelligence glasses he was wearing. The onlookers who were gathered around him in a demonstration space in Fenggang town burst into applause, marveling at this technological scene.
Yang, general manager of Dongguan Qianhuan Shiheng Industrial Co, was wearing a pair of smart glasses developed by the company, which entered the AI eyewear arena in 2022.
They are part of a fully self-developed smart glasses system launched last year that features a 13-megapixel camera powered by proprietary optics, hardware and algorithms, all designed and manufactured entirely in-house.
According to data from the research firm Omdia, global shipments of AI glasses reached 8.7 million units last year, a year-on-year increase of 322 percent. Even more striking is the fact that more than 4 million of these — nearly half of all AI glasses globally — were shipped by enterprises based in Dongguan, Guangdong province.
The southern manufacturing hub not only ranks first in the world for shipment volume, but also marks a profound shift. Once known as the "world's factory", Dongguan has quietly evolved into a global hub for smart products, and the AI glasses perched on millions of noses are its new calling card.
Step inside the facilities of Snoko Electronics Technology Co, and that newly forged reputation becomes even more matter-of-fact.
Xu Zuowei, the company's general manager, reels off the functions of Snoko's smart glasses: music playback, phone calls, AI voice interaction, photography, video recording, real-time translation and navigation.
The glasses free your hands, he said, adding that you can answer a call without reaching for your phone, chat with a voice assistant that offers emotional comfort as readily as it handles daily queries, and capture fleeting moments that would otherwise slip away in the time it takes to get your phone out of your pocket.
Snoko entered the AI glasses market five years ago, and has since shipped more than 1 million units, with an annual production value exceeding 100 million yuan ($14.7 million). Between 70 and 80 percent of its smart glasses are sold overseas, reaching retailers in Southeast Asia, Japan and South Korea, as well as Europe and the Americas. Prices for the glasses range from around 100 yuan to several thousand, depending on the model and configuration.
The company has recently launched ultralight AI glasses weighing 25 grams. They are designed to be comfortable to wear for hours on end. Supporting real-time translation of 160 languages, they boast a battery life of more than 20 hours — becoming portable interpreters that outlast a long-haul flight.
Xu said he believes that the future trajectory is clear: "AI glasses will become smarter, more intuitive, user-friendly and convenient. Just like smartphones, they will evolve into an indispensable part of our lives."
Zhang Jiawei, chief executive officer of Guangdong-based Kreta Yunke Technology Co, is driven by something more altruistic. His company's AI glasses can help the visually impaired navigate the world, correct their wearers' sitting posture, identify parasites and offer traditional Chinese medicine diagnoses.
The approach is deliberate: Find an overlooked aspect of life and use a pair of glasses to see it better than human eyes ever could.
In one very specific application, Zhang's company developed smart glasses that help herdsmen locate caterpillar fungus, a prized ingredient in traditional medicine that is notoriously difficult to spot. Powered by specialized algorithms and large models, the glasses can detect the fungus over a one-meter range and send out an instant alert. A task that once demanded backbreaking patience and trained intuition has been reduced to a quiet beep.
"It greatly lowers the difficulty for herdsmen to locate the fungus," said Zhang. "And, at the same time, it is a way to empower the agricultural sector."
There is a quiet poetry to the fact that all of this — half the world's AI glasses, bound for mountains, boardrooms and megacities alike — traces back to the workshops and research and development labs of Dongguan.
A city that once stitched and assembled for the world now thinks for it in a whisper: "Xiaohuan, capture the scene." A scene, it seems, that has already been set — one pair of glasses at a time.
Hu Xiaotong contributed to this story.
