The category arrives in two shapes. One is a pendant or a pin, worn on a collar, that captures audio all day and hands it to a model which transcribes, summarises and later answers questions like who you met and what you agreed. The other is a pair of glasses with a camera on the temple, which does the same and can see. The bill of materials is modest either way: a microphone array, a small camera, Bluetooth and WiFi, a very small cell, and almost no local compute, because the thinking happens on somebody's server. The engineering problem is not the intelligence, it is thermal and battery in an object worn on a face for sixteen hours. Production-class camera glasses land under about 40 grams, and every gram is argued over.
Now the part that makes this page different from earbuds or action cameras: the platform is not designed here. The dominant reference design for AI glasses is Qualcomm's Snapdragon AR1, productised into a build-ready package by Thundercomm, a ThunderSoft and Qualcomm joint venture headquartered in San Diego with its Chinese engineering in Beijing and Chongqing, offered to ODMs through Qualcomm's Snapdragon START programme at under 40 grams and sixteen hours. The pendant brands are American too. Limitless was acquired by Meta and stopped selling on 5 December 2025, Bee went to Amazon, Friend and Omi are San Francisco companies, and Plaud is a Delaware corporation run out of San Francisco. What the Pearl River Delta owns in this category is not the platform. It is the two hardest physical layers, the optics and the build, plus a genuinely strong brand bench.
There is a tell, and it doubles as the most useful diligence trick on this site. Plaud's NotePin carries FCC ID 2A6T3-PN0200, and the grantee on that record is Shenzhen Smart Connect Technology; one of Plaud's co-founders is a Shenzhen factory owner. That is the shape of the whole pendant category, an American brand and a Shenzhen builder, and it hands you a free lookup. Take any AI wearable, find the FCC ID printed on the device or buried in its manual, search the FCC grantee database, and you will usually be looking at the name of the company that actually made it. It works on the glasses as well as the pendants, and it is faster than asking.
Be careful with the geography here, because this industry is the most scattered in the atlas and the delta does not hold a monopoly on any of it. Rokid is in Hangzhou, XREAL in Beijing, Goertek, the largest AR and VR contract manufacturer, is in Shandong, and INMO designed its early glasses in TCL Technology Park in Nanshan before moving its headquarters to Chengdu in 2024. What remains concentrated here is worth the trip anyway: Shenzhen for the brands and for the waveguide optics that decide whether a display in a lens is even possible, and Dongguan for assembly at a scale nobody else offers. Read the delta's role in this category as supplier and builder to a global industry rather than as its author.
The export gate is the sharpest in this guide, and it is not a certification. CE, RED and FCC for the radio are routine. Consent is not. A device that records people who never agreed to be recorded is exposed in a way nothing else in this atlas is: two-party consent states in the United States make silently recording a private conversation a criminal matter, and in the EU the bystander's voice and face are personal data under GDPR with no household exemption once the wearer leaves their own home. The AI Act stacks further obligations on top wherever the system infers biometrics or emotion. Even Realities routes its European operation through a German entity, which tells you how seriously the category treats this. Treat a visible recording indicator, on-device deletion, a documented retention period and a straight answer to where the audio is processed as commercial requirements. Products in this category fail on the law, not the lab.