ByteDance Reportedly Developing AI-Powered Smart Glasses to Compete with Meta
ByteDance, the Beijing-based tech giant best known as the parent company of TikTok, is reportedly working on its most ambitious consumer hardware product to date: a pair of AI-powered smart glasses. According to industry sources cited by Chinese media and The Information, the company began development on the project in 2023 and has since been assembling a specialized hardware team, consulting with component suppliers, and exploring use cases for the wearable.
Unlike previous experimental projects such as smart earbuds, this initiative appears to be a serious effort to enter the emerging market for wearable AI. The goal is to create smart glasses that can not only capture high-quality video and audio, but also support real-time AI-driven functionalities — such as voice-assisted tasks, object recognition, or potentially even language translation — powered by ByteDance’s in-house LLM known as Doubao.
The move comes at a time when several tech giants, including Meta and Amazon, are betting on AI glasses as the next frontier for post-smartphone computing. Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, launched in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, have been praised for their social media integration and AI assistant features. ByteDance appears to be eyeing a similar product category, possibly integrating short-form content, visual search, and multimodal AI interaction into a lightweight, wearable format.
ByteDance has also been deepening its capabilities in AR/VR through its ownership of Pico, a virtual reality headset manufacturer it acquired in 2021. At MWC 2025, ByteDance announced a strategic collaboration with Qualcomm to co-develop next-generation mixed-reality headsets. This indicates a broader hardware roadmap, in which smart glasses could serve as an entry point to a larger ambient computing ecosystem.
While there is no confirmed launch date, the product is reportedly still in the prototype and component selection phase. Some sources say ByteDance is prioritizing features such as long battery life, high-resolution imaging, and privacy-friendly AI functions.
Meanwhile, the company continues to navigate political and regulatory headwinds abroad. Its flagship product, TikTok, faces increasing scrutiny in the U.S., where Congress has passed a bill requiring ByteDance to divest or face a ban. Despite these challenges, ByteDance’s move into hardware signals a long-term vision that extends well beyond social media.