Product1 publisher3 min readPublished
Schools and pools ban AI glasses as camera-equipped models still dominate sales
Omdia's first-half count shows AI glasses growth still running almost entirely on pairs with cameras. The restrictions arriving on wearers come from Australian schools, city councils and draft rules in Beijing.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Omdia counted 4.2 million AI glasses shipped worldwide in the first half of 2026, up 127% on the same period a year earlier.
- Meta shipped 3.4 million of those pairs, for an 81.3% share of global shipments, the research firm said.
- Even Realities climbed from fifth place in the second half of 2025 to second with a 2.4% share, on demand in North America and Western Europe for its G2, a pair with neither a camera nor speakers.
- Mainland China's shipments rose 306% year on year to 520,000 units, with Alibaba at 17.4%, INMO at 14.6% and Xiaomi at 14.0%, or 46.1% of that market between them.
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Why it matters
- constraint Western Australia's ban on smart glasses in every public school, and the pool bans from councils in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, stop the hardware at the door, and they apply whatever the device's privacy settings say.
- contradiction Omdia names mounting privacy scrutiny as a headwind for the category while putting hands-free photo and video capture first among the features selling the devices.
- decision Anyone issuing glasses to a field team is now choosing between a device that can document what the worker sees and one whose record of a meeting is a transcript on a monochrome display.
- precedent If Meta ships the reported camera-free model, going without a camera stops being a small vendor's differentiator and becomes a catalogue option from the company holding most of the market.
Buy the Even Realities G2 and what you get is a slim frame, a small monochrome display and productivity features such as real-time transcription [5]. Omdia counted 102,000 of those in the first half [4]. Meta shipped 3.4 million [3], so the leader moves about 33 pairs for every one the runner-up does [1]. Omdia's vendor chart names Alibaba third worldwide at 2.1% [6].
Qiran Ju, a senior analyst at Omdia, said vendors "have made the value proposition immediately clear to buyers by focusing on hands-free photo and video capture, open-ear audio, and AI assistance within everyday frames" [7]. The United States took 53.7% of the half and grew 103% year on year [11], or roughly 2.26 million pairs [2]. Nearly all of that volume has a camera on the front, because the leader sells glasses with a camera and the vendor in second place sells a pair that leaves it off [24].
The half was smaller than the one before it. Omdia's chart puts 4.2 million in the first six months of 2026 against 6.5 million in the second half of 2025 [1][10], a fall of about 35% [3]. The firm called AI glasses an emerging category with growth stabilising as the market expands from a very low base, and its write-up does not explain the sequential drop [20].
Jason Low, research director at Omdia, said on Tuesday: "As scrutiny of camera-equipped AI glasses intensifies, tighter privacy settings and clearer messaging will not be enough" [8]. Companies must define exactly what always-on cameras capture, show users how that content is used, and guarantee it never reaches third parties, he said [9].
Beijing's own rules are in progress, and want a light on the glasses whenever they record [14]. Omdia calls mainland China the main supply chain hub for the devices and a testbed for new combinations of display, camera and audio [13].
The Information reported on 15 September, citing people familiar with the matter, that Meta plans camera-free glasses codenamed Luna with six built-in microphones for talking to Meta AI and to Muse, a button on the side to call up Meta AI, and speakers similar to those in the current models [15]. Reuters, which carried the report, said Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment [17]. Omdia published its count the day before Connect, where Meta is expected to show a camera-free pair [2], and Mark Zuckerberg's keynote starts at 4pm Pacific on Wednesday [21].
Whoever has to hand these to staff on Monday needs to settle whether the job needs capture, and whether the wearer will be admitted to the rooms where the job happens. If both are yes, the camera pair is the one with volume behind it. Volume draws accessories and firmware attention. If capture matters but the rooms are closed, the obstacle is an entry rule. If capture does not matter, the transcription-first pair already works, and the vendor list is short: Even Realities, plus Halliday, which relaunched with a camera-free pair aimed at meetings in July [19].
What to watch
- Whether Zuckerberg shows the camera-free pair at Connect, and whether the reported October ship date holds.
- Whether Beijing finalises the recording-light requirement, and whether it binds devices assembled in China for export.
- Whether Even Realities keeps second place in Omdia's second-half count once Meta sells a camera-free pair of its own.