Omdia puts Meta at 81.3% of AI glasses shipments, and second place has no camera

Meta shipped 3.4 million of the 4.2 million AI glasses that went out worldwide in the first half of 2026, or 81.3% of the market, according to Omdia. Second place went to Even Realities with 102,000 pairs and a 2.4% share, on glasses that have no camera and no speakers.

Meta accounted for 3.4 million of the 4.2 million pairs Omdia counted in the first half of 2026. Image: Meta

The 4.2 million pairs are a record for the category, up 127% year on year. Qiran Ju, Senior Analyst at Omdia, says the growth “was driven by Meta’s continued market momentum and a wave of new market entrants from China”.

Even Realities climbed from fifth place to second

Omdia says demand for the G2 series across North America and Western Europe lifted Even Realities from fifth place in the second half of 2025. Its design “removes both the camera and speakers”, Omdia says, in favour of a slimmer frame, a small monochrome display and productivity features such as real-time transcription.

That is a different product from the one Meta sells, and 2.4% is not a run at 81.3%. It does put Even Realities, the camera-free startup that raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation in July, ahead of every Chinese vendor Omdia names.

Counting the same half-year, Counterpoint put 96% of AI glasses shipments in displayless frames and measured growth at 263%. The two firms count different baskets of products, and Omdia does not publish its category definition, so the 136-point gap between the two growth rates says more about what each firm counts than about the market.

The direction is consistent, though. IDC had glasses taking nearly 85% of XR shipments in the second quarter while headsets lost share, and Omdia now has the AI glasses slice of that alone more than doubling in six months.

Even Realities shipped 102,000 pairs of the G2 series, which has no camera and no speakers. Image: Even Realities

China supplies the new entrants, the US still buys the most

Mainland China shipments rose 306% year on year, and the market there stays fragmented, with Alibaba, INMO and Xiaomi together on 46.1% of Chinese shipments. Omdia says the US “remains by far the largest AI glasses market”, while mainland China works as both a supply chain hub and a testbed for new hardware configurations.

Ju credits the category’s clarity for the rest, saying 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”. That reads like a description of Meta’s line rather than the runner-up’s.

Omdia’s window also closed before Meta’s newest frames went on sale. Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 3) arrived on September 23 at $449 in the US, with a camera-free Ray-Ban Meta Audio at $349 shipping on October 13, and Meta says it will offer more than 100 different glasses options across Ray-Ban, Oakley and Meta Glasses by the end of the year.

So the second-half table will be drawn against a much wider Meta line-up than the one that produced 81.3%. On these figures, nobody else in the category has yet cleared 3%.