If you’ve been waiting for a serious competitor to challenge Meta’s dominance in the smart glasses arena, MWC 2026 just delivered the news you wanted to hear. After months of speculation and vague hints, Samsung has finally broken its silence. The tech giant confirmed that it will launch its own AI-powered smart glasses later this year, marking a significant shift in its wearable strategy.
But here is the twist: don’t expect a sci-fi heads-up display floating in front of your eyes. Samsung is taking a very specific, calculated approach that prioritizes form factor and AI utility over visual immersion. Internally codenamed "Project HAEAN," this device isn’t trying to replace your television; it’s trying to give your AI assistant eyes and ears.
Let’s break down what we learned from Barcelona and what this means for the future of face-worn wearables.
What features will Samsung’s new smart glasses actually have?
The most important takeaway from the MWC announcement is that Samsung is focusing on "capture" rather than "display." According to the details released, the glasses will feature an eye-level camera and microphones, but they will likely skip the built-in display entirely.
This sounds surprisingly similar to the strategy Meta employed with its Ray-Ban collaboration, and it seems Samsung has taken note of that success. By removing the display, engineers can keep the glasses lightweight and stylish—two factors that have historically killed AR projects before they even hit the shelves.
Jay Kim, Samsung’s Executive VP of Mobile, described the device as a conduit for artificial intelligence. "The glasses will be more of a gateway for AI to capture and understand what you see," Kim explained. The goal isn’t to doom-scroll social media on your lenses; it is to allow the AI to see the world from your perspective and offer assistance based on visual and audio context.
This separates Project HAEAN distinctly from "Project Moohan," the bulkier Galaxy XR headset launched in late 2025. While Moohan was about immersion, HAEAN is about all-day wearability.
How does the partnership with Google and Qualcomm work?
Samsung isn’t going it alone. This device represents a tripod of tech giants working in unison. The hardware is Samsung, the chipset is Qualcomm, and the software backbone is Google.
The glasses will run on the "Android XR" platform and will heavily leverage Google’s Gemini AI. This partnership is crucial because hardware is only half the battle with smart glasses. If the AI isn’t smart enough to understand that you’re looking at a menu in a foreign language or a broken bicycle part, the camera is just a gimmick.
To ensure the frames remain slim, Jay Kim stated that the glasses will be tethered to a smartphone for processing. This "distributed processing" approach offloads the heavy lifting to the Galaxy phone in your pocket. It’s a smart trade-off: you get a lighter device on your face, and your phone’s battery takes the hit for the complex AI computations.
Why is Samsung skipping the display for this model?
It might seem counterintuitive for the world’s leading display manufacturer to release a gadget without a screen, but the decision appears to be purely pragmatic. Current battery technology simply cannot support high-brightness transparent displays in a form factor that looks like normal eyewear for all-day use.
Jay Kim was direct about this choice, noting, "We have other products like the smartwatch or phone if a user needs a display." He also added, "Everybody talks about what the next AI device is… Glasses, obviously is one of them."
By skipping the screen, Samsung avoids the "glasshole" aesthetic of the old Google Glass era and sidesteps the bulk that plagues true AR headsets. It also positions the device as an accessory to the smartphone rather than a replacement—a safer bet for mass adoption. While rumors suggest a follow-up "Display AI" model could arrive in 2027, for now, audio and camera inputs are the main event.
Looking Ahead
This is the validation the smart glasses market needed. Until now, Meta has enjoyed an estimated 82% market share largely because no other major player offered a compelling, lightweight alternative. Samsung’s entry changes the calculus completely. By leveraging the massive install base of Galaxy users and the Android XR ecosystem, Samsung can normalize "AI on your face" much faster than niche startups ever could.
The winners here are consumers who want AI assistance without looking like cyborgs. The losers may be the standalone AI hardware startups (like the Rabbit R1 or Humane AI Pin) that tried to reinvent the wheel without the necessary ecosystem. Samsung is betting that the best place for AI isn’t a new square badge on your chest—it’s right on the bridge of your nose, connected to the phone you already own.
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