Hong Kong Optical Fair 2026: Smart Eyewear Takes the Main Floor
The 34th Hong Kong International Optical Fair opened on 4 November and runs to 6 November at the Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai. HKTDC, which organises the fair with the Hong Kong Optical Manufacturers Association, puts the exhibitor count at more than 600, from 14 countries and regions. The theme this year is Enhancing Your Vision. Smart eyewear has its own zone, with an Innovation Hub alongside.
Three tags sit on the exhibitor directory: Smart Ageing Products, Smart Eyewear and Green Solutions.
Who is showing what
About 200 brands sit in the Brand Name Gallery, among them Masunaga, Modo, STEPPER and Off-White. Visionaries of Style covers independent designers, and the Designer Village was expanded this year. Categories run from frames and components to lenses, contact lenses, sports and specialist eyewear, children's frames and optometric instruments.
The supporting programme includes the 24th Hong Kong International Optometric Symposium on 5 November, on primary eye care, and the 26th Hong Kong Eyewear Design Competition, themed Mix & Match, which added a student Technology Concept Award. Click2Match stays open until 13 November.
The hardware
Five products show where the category currently splits.
|
Product |
Booth |
What it does |
|
Liweike AI Memory Glasses |
GH-D11 |
10 g detachable magnetic camera, hands-free capture and voice notes, AI-generated meeting minutes |
|
INMO Air3 (Sichuan Yingmu) |
GH-C10 |
Sony Micro OLED, 1080p, Android 14, ChatGPT assistant, 4K capture, navigation |
|
GetD GSPRO (Shenzhen GetD) |
GH-A26 |
26 g, six-axis gyroscope for neck posture, fall alerts, Find My, GPT and Gemini, translation in 145+ languages |
|
Muedo U10 reading glasses |
n/a |
Auto-adjusting focal power across 100–400 degrees of presbyopia, AI chip, voice and button control |
|
Ka Fung hearing glasses |
GH-D22 |
Hearing aid built into the frame, bone conduction, swappable reading lenses |
Two design routes are visible. One keeps the product close to a normal pair of glasses and puts the electronics in the temples. The other builds around a display, which changes the optical stack and, with it, the frame.
The numbers, with a caveat
|
Metric |
Figure |
Change |
Source |
|
Global AI eyewear shipments, FY2025 |
8.7 m units |
+322% |
Omdia, cited by HKTDC |
|
Global smart glasses shipments, Q1 2026 |
3.566 m units |
+130.1% |
IDC, cited by HKTDC |
Definitions matter here. Audio glasses, AI glasses and display-equipped AR eyewear are classified differently by different research houses, and 2025 estimates for AI eyewear range from 8.4 m to 8.7 m units depending on the source. The direction is consistent; the absolute figures are not directly comparable.
Three things are driving volume. Voice interaction became cheap enough to run on a temple-mounted SoC rather than a phone. The supply chain around Shenzhen now offers Micro OLED panels, camera modules, open-ear audio units and low-power Bluetooth silicon off the shelf. And much of the demand is not fashion-led: reading glasses, hearing glasses and children's eye-care frames answer a clinical need.
What importers ask first
The questions buyers bring to these products are consistent: weight in grams, whether the frame takes a prescription, battery life under real use, and whether a recording indicator is visible.
Buyers usually test these four points before anything else. All four also map onto tooling decisions, which is why they tend to surface late in a programme.
Where the engineering sits
Beyond the electronics, a good part of the work is mechanical.
Space comes first. Camera, speaker, battery, PCB and antenna share a temple that is typically 1.8 to 2.2 mm thick, and what remains still has to carry hinge loads. If the stack is not settled before tooling, a trial shot becomes a tool change, measured in weeks.
Material choice follows. PPSU resists heat and hydrolysis, G850 holds toughness and takes coating evenly, EMS is lighter, TR90 absorbs impact, CP costs less but has a lower heat ceiling. With a heat source against the inside of the temple, the polymer is a durability question before it is a cost question.
Tolerance is the third. Magnetic docking faces, hinge angles and lens clips work at the 0.1 mm level; drift there shows up as rework.
Finishing decides how the product reads in a store. Dust-free painting is judged on colour consistency and abrasion, and a batch that shifts colour comes back from retail.
Lead time ties it together. Tooling, trial, correction and pilot run have to fit inside a launch window that is usually a few months wide.
Most of this work sits with frame makers in Shenzhen and Dongguan. We build frame structures and precision metal parts in Henggang, Shenzhen (smart eyewear components).
FAQ
When is the fair open? 4–6 November 2026, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, 1 Expo Drive, Wan Chai. Halls close at 18:30 on 4 and 5 November, and 17:00 on 6 November. Click2Match runs to 13 November.
Is smart eyewear the same as AI eyewear? No. Smart eyewear also covers Bluetooth audio frames and display-based AR glasses. AI eyewear usually refers to devices running a voice assistant, live translation or image recognition. Research firms classify the segments differently.
Can a smart frame take prescription lenses? In most cases, provided the frame has a lens groove and enough depth. Display models also need the optical engine and lens spacing resolved, which should be agreed with the lens supplier at design stage.
