As I write this, CES 2025 is on its third day. Once the show closes on January 10 and I have more time to digest what I saw and the big themes and products released, I will share those in my column early next week.
However, I have determined three key trends that have run through the show so far.
The first is that AI was everywhere at the show. You could not find a vendor that did not mention AI in its booth displays or marketing material. AI was demonstrated in many ways, but the central theme manifested in the term “smart” applied to devices, apps, and services using AI in some form.
There were smart TVs, cars, trucks, boats, and motorcycles. There were smart kitchen appliances, vacuums, various business and consumer robots, watches, etc. And, of course, my favorite—smart toilets.
Echoing this smart focus was the second big theme of health-related wearables. New smart rings, like the one from Ringconn can now detect sleep apnea. Ultrahuman and Aura both showed new health monitoring features in their new rings. Dexcom showed the over-the-counter consumer-focused Stelo which monitors glucose to reveal how food, exercise, and even sleep affect your glucose. This device is especially important for those with pre-diabetes as well as those who need to understand how their exercise and foods impact blood sugars.
Abbot showed off two similar over-the-counter devices; Lingo, sold as a wellness product for people who do not have diabetes. The other is Abbott’s new Libre Rio device, intended for adults with Type 2 diabetes who do not use insulin, posing a direct challenge to Dexcom’s Stelo device.
The folks at Techradar shared a more detailed look at the health wearables at this year’s CES and included details about the Garmin Instinct 3 smartwatch, the Circular Ring 2, Withings Omnia, and others that were front and center of the wearable health products introduced at CES 2025.
The third theme of the show was an emphasis on smart glasses. Xreal had a large booth that showed off its new Xreal One and Xreal Pro.
I have been using the Xreal smart glasses for over a year. These are my go-to glasses for watching videos. The current version can give the wearer a virtual 100-inch screen, and the new versions display a visual screen, which appears to be a 500-inch screen. I use these to watch videos and movies when I fly, and it feels like I am in a theater, not in a cramped plane seat. I spoke with Xreal’s CEO, and he shared an excellent roadmap for their glasses that will make them smarter and with new designs in the future.
I saw at least seven new smart glasses at the show. One interesting one was from Even Realities called the Even G1. It displays information on the glass lenses themselves. I had a demo from their CEO, and as he spoke in Chinese, it translated what he said into English on the glass lenses.
The folks at ZDNet tested many other smart glasses at CES 2025 and shared their experiences in this link.
The CES 2025 session I moderated on Tuesday, January 8, was centered on XR headsets and smart glasses. My panel included Jason McGuigan, head of Virtual Reality at Lenovo, Kelly Ingham, VP Wearables and Research Partners, Reality Labs, at Meta and Scott Meyers, VP of Hardware at Snap.
The session focused on XR headsets and smart glasses, and the panelists mostly agreed that XR headsets will continue to be used more for gaming, many enterprise apps, especially training, and in some educational circles.
Kelly Ingham shared how the Quest headset has become the best-selling XR headset in the market, with thousands of apps supporting its Horizon OS platform. While gaming is at the core of most Quest models, it has thousands of apps related to a multitude of areas, such as Supernatural for exercise, one called Bigscreen, a social media video-streaming app, Open Brush, a 3D painting app, and one called Whirligig, a media player to watch local files in VR.
Jason McGuigan of Lenovo shared how their XR headsets are being used in many business and industrial applications and pointed out that their core audience has been enterprise and business companies. These firms have adopted XR for areas like digital twins, manufacturing, and many forms of enterprise solutions.
We quickly switched to the subject of smart glasses as all three panelists have products in this area and are experts. Smart glasses are poised to become one of the hottest areas in tech over the next three years.
Scott Myers shared how their Snap Spectacles have become the leading smart glasses in the market today. They already have hundreds of thousands of users and developers supporting the Snap OS and will continue adding more apps and features in 2025.
Lenovo also has new smart glasses in the works, and Jason sees this as another important area for Lenovo’s continued investment.
Kelly Ingham of Meta gave an update on Orion, their new smart glass project they demoed at their developer conference in September 2025. They already have thousands of developers supporting their Meta Horizon OS and it will be one of the important platforms for XR headsets and smart glasses going forward.
Kelly also gave an update on the Meta-Rayban Wayfarer glasses. She said they are working on adding more AI features, one of which I am personally deeply interested in: translation. She said this is already working and being tested and should be released later this year.
The panel also discussed Google’s introduction of Android XR OS in December of 2025.
This new XR and smart glasses OS will most likely become a powerful new way for major hardware vendors to enter the smart glasses market by 2026. So far, Samsung, Qualcomm, Sony, and Xreal have committed to Android XR, and you can expect Google to have its own version, too.
Once Google releases the Android XR developers kit, we should see thousands of Android XR apps appear soon as hardware makers release their smart glasses supporting this OS.
Apple is the other company we expect to be in the smart glasses mix. Apple has had smart glasses in the works since at least 2016 and is expected to be another major player in the market. Apple has shown that it can be late to a market and still dominate it. Whatever they eventually bring to market in hardware will have a strong base of developers trained in AR Kit, the third major platform for smart glasses.
Snap has a good lead in this area but will face new competition, as will others with their own OS.
The panel also shared that they see smart glasses eventually becoming the most ubiquitous way people will get digital information and interact with it. This does not mean that it will replace a PC or even a smartphone, but as a digital wearable that is always on and accessible, it could become our most powerful way to navigate our digital world.
Toward the end of the discussion, I asked the panelists what technical hurdles we still have to help smart glasses deliver the best user experience. One significant issue was identified, which poses a genuine technical challenge. This concern pertains to the specific type of lenses required to project information or data onto the glasses effectively.
I have been working on this area for 10 years and have met with most of the optics companies working on it. Despite recent advancements, we remain several years away from realizing optimal lenses for smart glasses. These lenses must simultaneously deliver in-glass information, have enhanced energy efficiency, and achieve the resolution necessary for a seamless user experience.
CES remains daunting, with 135,000 in attendance and over two million square feet of exhibit space in seven venues across Las Vegas. I averaged 22,000 steps each day. As someone who has been to 50 CES shows so far, I find it more difficult to cover this show the bigger it gets. However, for me and many others, the trek is worth it to see the latest and greatest technology presented in a single-show environment.
With new developments in XR, AI, and wearable tech, CES 2025 has solidified its place as a barometer for the next wave of innovation. As we move into 2025 and beyond, it’s exciting to think about how these trends will evolve and transform our digital experiences.
Disclosure: Lenovo, Google, Qualcomm, Samsung and Apple subscribe to Creative Strategies research reports along with many other high tech companies around the world.
