In 2026, full-color AI glasses are launching in clusters; RayNeo preheats the full-color Micro-LED optical waveguide iO+

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In 2026, the AI glasses industry is accelerating toward the "full-color" era.

At the start of the year, Meta announced that due to US market demand exceeding expectations and tight inventory supply, it had decided to postpone the international market expansion plan for its first consumer-facing full-color glasses, Meta Ray-Ban Display. By October, Snap suddenly brought in Robert Downey Jr., who once played "Iron Man," to endorse its AR glasses SPECS, in an attempt to draw more market attention to this $2,195 product.

Domestically, the full-color AI glasses market is equally lively. On October 27, images leaked of the fourth-generation binocular full-color AI glasses RayNeo iO+, not yet launched, worn by Jiang Qiming at a Vogue event; on the same day, Rokid officially launched the full-color AI glasses Rokid Color, adopting a Micro-LED and diffractive optical waveguide solution, priced from 4,999 yuan; INMO also teased a spatial smart glasses launch event themed "Beyond Full-Color" to be held on November 4.

For the entire industry, the trend of color display moving toward the consumer market is becoming increasingly obvious, and the perception given to the consumer market must also become stronger, but optical volume, display effects, power consumption and cost remain real problems facing manufacturers. Especially as AI glasses all begin to pursue all-day wear and proactive AI, how to achieve high-quality, lighter-wearing full-color display in a form factor close to ordinary glasses is a common proposition for everyone.

Full-color combined-color Micro-LED optical engines are getting smaller and smaller, approaching monochrome volume

This year, the miniaturization progress of full-color Micro-LED optical engines has clearly accelerated.

Take Roadrunner II, released in June by Micro-LED microdisplay manufacturer JBD, as an example. It is developed based on a 0.1-inch Micro-LED microdisplay panel, with a pixel pitch of 2.5 microns, a pixel density of 10,160, and a volume of only 0.18cc; Rayz's PowerMatch®️ 1 full-color Micro-LED optical engine using quantum dot lithography technology has also achieved 0.18cc, can provide a luminous flux output of 0.7lm, and supports 30° FOV glasses design; Hongshi's Yunjin XC7 color Micro-LED optical engine is said to have reached 0.15cc.

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Some clues can actually be seen from the photos released by RayNeo this time. iO+ continues the lightweight frame design of RayNeo iO launched in August this year. Apart from the more fashionable tortoiseshell-pattern frame, the temple part where the optical engine is located seems to be only slightly taller than the monochrome green version, and the entire pair of glasses still maintains an appearance close to everyday glasses.

RayNeo iO (left) and RayNeo iO+ (right)

You should know that miniaturizing full-color optical engines is far more difficult than monochrome solutions. In particular, Micro-LED optical engines using RGB three-color combination need to simultaneously accommodate three sets of microdisplay devices and a light-combining structure within an extremely limited space, while also ensuring the precision and brightness of the displayed image. Now that full-color optical engines have gradually approached the volume level of monochrome optical engines, this is undoubtedly a technological progress worth noting for the entire AR industry.

In addition to the miniaturization of the optical engine, another visible upgrade of iO+ is on the front of the lenses. Traditional diffractive optical waveguide glasses, when the screen is lit or when exposed to strong light on set, are prone to showing obvious waveguide region outlines and colorful reflections in the middle of the lenses. Looking carefully at the front photo of iO+ worn by Jiang Qiming, even when facing a close-up camera shot, the grating area of the waveguide on the lenses is almost invisible from the front, and there is no obvious reflection.

The reason RayNeo was able to make the full-color optical engine so compact while also maintaining the transparent look of the optical waveguide is in fact inseparable from its "obsession" with full-color optics over the past five years.

AI glasses new products are booming, but full-color Micro-LED optical waveguide remains a minority

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The year-by-year increasing hardware data shows that there are more and more industry players, and market competition is gradually becoming white-hot. Technical solutions such as monochrome green optical waveguide, single optical engine binocular, and monocular full-color continue to emerge, and manufacturers have made their own choices around different product positioning and market demands. However, in such a dense wave of new products, products using full-color Micro-LED optical waveguide are few and far between, and brands that truly achieve consumer-grade mass production and can continue to iterate are even rarer.

Even a global tech giant like Meta faces similar technical challenges. In 2024, Meta demonstrated Orion, which uses full-color Micro-LED and silicon carbide optical waveguide, but this product has so far remained at the internal experimental stage. The Meta Ray-Ban Display, officially launched in 2025, chose a monocular full-color LCoS and geometric optical waveguide solution.

So why is full-color Micro-LED optical waveguide so difficult, yet still favored by the industry over the long term? For AR glasses intended to carry complex spatial interaction, the high brightness, self-emission and miniaturization potential of Micro-LED, combined with the thin, transparent structural advantages of optical waveguide, are expected to achieve a better balance between display performance and everyday wearable form. But for this technology route to truly reach the consumer market, many engineering challenges remain.

At present, full-color Micro-LED display mainly follows two routes: RGB three-color combination and single-chip full color. The former uses optical structures such as X-Cube to combine three-color microdisplay images into a full-color picture, and its industrialization is relatively mature; the latter achieves single-chip full color through technologies such as quantum dot color conversion and vertical stacking, but still faces challenges in luminous efficiency, manufacturing processes and yield.

Even with the relatively mature RGB color combination solution, three Micro-LED microdisplay panels must be precisely aligned at the micron level, and any slight deviation may affect color and image quality. At the same time, the three-color light sources must also undergo optical waveguide coupling and propagation, balancing light efficiency, color uniformity, heat dissipation and production yield within a limited volume. Bringing these technical indicators simultaneously to consumer-grade mass production levels remains a major challenge for the industry to this day.

The first to eat crabs: RayNeo's five-year "obsession"

But it is precisely this extremely technically difficult route that this Chinese manufacturer has continued to invest in for five years.

As early as October 2021, RayNeo launched the binocular full-color Micro-LED optical waveguide glasses RayNeo X1 Pioneer Edition, validating the feasibility of achieving binocular full-color display in a glasses form factor. At that time, the generative AI wave had not yet arrived, and the industry was still exploring the product forms and application scenarios of consumer-grade AR glasses, while RayNeo had already taken the lead in combining binocular full-color display with an appearance close to everyday glasses.

In 2023, RayNeo connected the mass production chain, and RayNeo X2 became the world's first binocular full-color Micro-LED optical waveguide AR glasses to achieve consumer-grade mass production and sales. The product features approximately 16.7 million colors, peak eye-entry brightness of over 1,500 nits and transmittance of over 85%, and also supports binocular different display and spatial navigation, allowing full-color optics to begin corresponding to specific use scenarios. Compared with the prototype, the more important progress of X2 lies in allowing consumers to actually buy binocular full-color Micro-LED optical waveguide glasses.

Being the first to eat crabs often requires paying a higher price. Especially for a route like full-color Micro-LED optical waveguide, which was not yet mature at the time and remains demanding even now, everything from early R&D and optical design to the exploration of manufacturing processes means a large investment of time, manpower and capital. According to Li Hongwei's earlier disclosure in an interview, RayNeo invests far more than one small target (100 million yuan) annually in AR optical technology R&D.

A more realistic problem is that even if the product is successfully mass-produced, whether the market is willing to pay for full-color display, and how long it will take to recover the early investment, had no clear answers at the time. But RayNeo still chose this path and continued to invest. To some extent, this is also a company's judgment on its own technology route and future market demand.

After X2, RayNeo continued to advance toward miniaturization and kept iterating. The X3 Pro launched in 2025 is equipped with the Firefly optical engine, with a volume reduced to 0.36 cubic centimeters, about 40% smaller than the previous generation, and remains the smallest full-color Micro-LED optical engine in mass production and on sale on the market today. The single-layer full-color etched waveguide developed in cooperation with Applied Materials of the United States reduces rainbow patterns by about 95%, reduces lens thickness by about 0.6 mm and weight by about 25%; combined with optical system optimization, the X3 Pro achieves average eye-entry brightness of 3,500 nits and peak eye-entry brightness of 6,000 nits.

Of course, the significance of full-color optics also lies in opening up more application scenarios for AR glasses. Taking RayNeo X3 Pro as an example, in addition to basic information prompts, it can already run third-party Android apps, allowing users to watch videos and Hongguo short dramas right before their eyes, and can also connect to Bluetooth controllers to directly play classic games such as FC and GBA, as well as native applications with a more futuristic visual sense such as 3D Smart Life (AI+AR Navigation Pro Max Edition).

Behind these experiences, full-color display provides a richer space for visual expression. Compared with monochrome interfaces mainly used for text prompts, color can more clearly distinguish map routes, buildings, icons and multimedia content, and also leaves room for more complex AI visual interaction and spatial applications.

At the same time, RayNeo's long-term investment in color optics and lightweight AR device technology has also begun to feed back into RayNeo's other product lines, becoming the technology foundation for the company's "rapid rise." After 2025, RayNeo ushered in an unprecedented breakout — based on the X2 and X3 series, RayNeo gradually evolved the screenless AI camera glasses V series, the screen-equipped AI glasses iO series focused on all-weather wear, and added the GT series with a larger field of view to the viewing series. By the end of 2025, RayNeo's shipments gradually surpassed other competitors and began to remain at the top of global quarterly AR glasses shipments.

Final thoughts

From X1 to X3 Pro, RayNeo has used several generations of products to solve three questions: whether full color can be made, whether it can be sold to consumers, and whether it can continue to shrink to a size suitable for daily wear. With the iO+ teaser, the more compact glasses appearance pushes this question to the next stage: how small and how good can a mass-producible Micro-LED full-color optical module actually become?

In addition, it is worth mentioning that RayNeo has launched full-color AR glasses for several consecutive years, which not only drives its own product line but also, to a certain extent, promotes technological iteration across the upstream and downstream supply chain. In the places the public can see, RayNeo continuously launches new full-color products; at the other end of the industry chain, RayNeo not only independently develops RGB color-combining light engines, but also continuously raises higher technical requirements to upstream suppliers, carrying out joint technical research with supply chain partners such as JBD, Applied Materials, and TCL in areas including microdisplays, image quality correction, and optical waveguides. At the same time, leading companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Amazon have also been able to develop scenarios and applications based on RayNeo X2 and X3 Pro products. Today, RayNeo has even begun supplying core components such as light engines to overseas manufacturers, enabling other brands to develop their own products based on these optical capabilities.

This mutual reinforcement between upstream and downstream is forming a virtuous cycle: end-user demand drives upstream technological iteration, and mature optical solutions are then applied to more products. As the technology continues to mature and mass-production scale gradually expands, early-stage R&D and manufacturing investments also have the opportunity to be further amortized, allowing the entire full-color AR industry chain to gradually form economies of scale.

Being the first to eat crab often means higher investment and trial-and-error costs. But over the past five years, RayNeo has not only brought full-color Micro-LED optical waveguide into the consumer market, but also gradually clarified the commercial prospects of this technical route.

For the still-exploring AR industry, RayNeo is like a lighthouse that lights up first, not only having found a path for itself, but also letting more people see the possibilities ahead.

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