Sector · Trade shows and events

A hall full of strangers who speak other languages

Trade fairs and events are where the glasses meet the widest range of reactions: booths that book orders through them, customs officers who inspect with them, and a hacker conference that throws you out for wearing them.

A fair floor is a hard room. It is loud, the person in front of you speaks a language you do not, you will meet two hundred people in three days and remember eleven, and everything you need to know is printed on a card somewhere behind you. Ten cases here work on that room, and they do not agree with each other.

The booth that closes the deal

The clearest results come from Chinese exhibition organizers. LAWK and Meorient put AI glasses on booth staff at Belt and Road fairs in Vietnam and Indonesia: in Jakarta the on-floor translation time passed 9,000 cumulative minutes, and one exhibitor said unimpeded conversation let it book several machines on the spot. At the China-ASEAN Expo an announced purchase of 1,000 pairs appears in the state news agency's report with the hedge 据悉, meaning it was reported second-hand; we publish it as an announced order and nothing more, because nobody has shown the 1,000 pairs in use.

The officer walking the aisles

Two cases are the state, not the seller. At the second China International Import Expo, China Telecom put AR glasses on the staff checking credentials, so roaming inspectors became mobile camera heads streaming back to a command centre over 5G. At the fourth edition, Shanghai Customs walked the halls with AR glasses that read the QR code on the display case and put the exhibit's country and name in the display, generating the report by voice. The customs office called the outcome a paperless round. Neither published a measured time.

The room that says no

DEF CON bans Meta AI glasses from the floor, prescription versions included, and will ask you to leave. The organizers of TechBBQ, HumanX and Deep Tech London decided the opposite: the issue is the behaviour, not the device, since a phone records just as covertly, and one of them proposed an opt-in disclosure instead of a ban. Anyone selling into events has to plan for both answers in the same season.

And the audience

The National Theatre in London built the case that has the strongest numbers in this file, and it is not about selling anything: caption glasses that follow the performance against the script took captioned access from about 5 percent of performances to about 80 percent, roughly 800 a year. One audience member told the paper he had not been to the theatre in 30 years.

Cited cases

Who
Hangzhou Lawaken Technology (李未可科技, brand LAWK) with exhibition organizer Meorient (米奥兰特国际会展) and exhibitor Dongguan Blackpanther Electronics (东莞黑豹电子)
What they did
LAWK and Meorient built what they call the first end-to-end hardware+software AI package for trade-fair booths: exhibition staff wear LAWK AI glasses running the WAKE-AI model, tuned for near-100 languages with extra depth on Southeast Asian languages, that keep >90% recognition accuracy down to -5dB background noise and auto-generate structured meeting minutes after each conversation.
What came out of it
At the 4th Vietnam-China Export Brand Joint Exhibition an exhibitor said the glasses '大幅提升了跨语言洽商效率' (sharply improved cross-language negotiation efficiency); at the 2025 Jakarta Indonesia International Industrial Week cumulative on-floor translation time passed 9,000 minutes and exhibitor Dongguan Blackpanther Electronics said unimpeded communication let it 'book several machines on the spot' (无障碍沟通让我们当场预定多台设备).
www.meorient.com
Who
China Telecom, with credential-check staff at the National Exhibition and Convention Center (Shanghai)
What they did
For the 2nd China International Import Expo (CIIE), China Telecom ran a '5G+AR inspection' scheme: staff doing mobile ID/credential checks at the venue's entry and exit points wore AR glasses whose camera feed streamed live over 5G to the accreditation and registration center's main screen. Roaming staff wearing the glasses effectively acted as mobile 'camera heads,' and the command center combined that live feed with early-warning data to issue instructions for handling incidents.
What came out of it
Deployed as one leg of the fair's security/command stack alongside a parallel '5G+VR panoramic surveillance' system and 5G-linked ambulances; the sources describe the rollout but publish no incident or performance figures.
tradeinservices.mofcom.gov.cn
Who
Dilovar Jumaev, purchasing representative of Tajikistan's Chamber of Commerce and Industry, trying AI glasses made by Shenzhen Yiming Electronics (深圳亿明电子)
What they did
At the 16th Kashgar Central and South Asia Commodity Fair (44 Belt and Road countries, 1,000+ Chinese exhibitors), Shenzhen Yiming Electronics showed AI smart glasses alongside smartwatches and translation earbuds, doing music playback and mutual translation across 100+ languages; Jumaev tried the glasses on the show floor.
What came out of it
Jumaev, on record: 'The AI glasses are of high quality, better than those made in other countries. They can play music and make mutual translations in more than 100 languages.' The report frames the fair as Chinese firms testing demand and building contacts in Central/South Asian markets rather than confirming a signed order for this specific buyer.
www.bastillepost.com
Who
DEF CON (hacker convention), Las Vegas
What they did
DEF CON's organizers ban Meta AI glasses from the show floor, including prescription Ray-Ban Meta versions, citing covert-recording risk in a community that prizes anonymity; anyone caught wearing the banned glasses can be asked to leave.
What came out of it
Cited by commentators, for example Madeline Lawrence, cofounder of security firm Aikido Security, on the community's data-capture and anonymity concerns, and it is the reference case other events point to. As of an August 2026 roundup, Dublin's invitation-only Rebase gathering (organized by Eamon Leonard of Baseline fund) and the UK's Wetherspoons pub chain had adopted comparable effective bans on recording via the glasses.
www.postradar.co.uk
Who
TechBBQ (Copenhagen), HumanX (Amsterdam) and Deep Tech London, conference organizers taking the opposite stance from DEF CON
What they did
Instead of banning Meta AI glasses, these organizers let attendees wear them under a general conduct policy rather than a device-specific rule. TechBBQ spokesman Keyvan Thomsen Bamdej: 'The issue isn't the device, it's the behaviour. You can just as easily covertly record someone using a smartphone,' also pointing to accessibility benefits for visually impaired attendees. HumanX co-founder/CEO Stefan Weitz compared banning the glasses to 'banning smartphones at a computer show in 2008.' Deep Tech London organizer Lachlan Chavasse proposed an opt-in ambient-recording disclosure instead of an outright ban.
What came out of it
As reported in August 2026, TechBBQ (recurring, Copenhagen), HumanX (Amsterdam, September 2026) and Deep Tech London (October 2026) had each declined to ban the glasses, treating the debate as one of conduct and consent policy rather than hardware bans.
www.postradar.co.uk
Who
Scott Fitsimones and Nik Shevchenko's five-person team, project name OpenGlass (BasedHardware)
What they did
Over a 36-hour AI hackathon, the team built OpenGlass: an open-source, roughly $20 hardware add-on (ESP32 microcontroller plus a small camera) that clips onto any ordinary glasses frame and connects what the wearer sees and hears to an AI chatbot (e.g. Meta's Llama 3). It is explicitly pitched to let the wearer 'remember people they meet', a DIY, hackable answer to the exact problem conference and trade-fair networking has, plus identify objects and translate text.
What came out of it
The team won the hackathon, the open-source project drew roughly 1,500 people onto a waitlist to pre-order kits, and the hardware/firmware are public on GitHub for anyone to build their own.
qz.com
Who
New Museum (New York), with Google 'Glass at Work'-certified developer GuidiGO
What they did
Google Glass was lead sponsor of the New Museum's 2015 Triennial exhibition. GuidiGO built a Glass app for the show that used image recognition to trigger interpretive content as visitors moved through the exhibition, letting the museum offer a hands-free, glasses-based guided tour of a live art exhibition rather than a printed guide or phone app. GuidiGO separately built what it billed as the first complete-exhibition Glass tour for San Francisco's de Young Museum.
What came out of it
Deployed as the visitor-facing layer of the 2015 New Museum Triennial and, separately, the de Young exhibition tour, early real-world examples of AR glasses purpose-built for a temporary exhibition/event rather than permanent wayfinding, years before today's consumer AI-glasses wave.
evgrieve.com
Who
National Theatre (London), with Jonathan Suffolk (the theatre's technical director and director of the Open Access Smart Capture project), live captioning specialist Professor Andrew Lambourne, and the partners the article names: Accenture (which it calls the theatre's innovation partner), Epson Eur
What they did
The theatre created the 'smart caption glasses' service: a hearing-impaired audience member books a pair of Epson Moverio BT-350 glasses and sees the play's captions projected on the lenses. The text does not come from a captioner typing live: a voice-following technology tracks the show's progress against the production's script ('It is able to track the show's progress through the script'), and the captions also carry the light and sound cues through the performance.
What came out of it
Launched on 3 October 2018, available at War Horse in November 2018 and extended to all three auditoria in April 2019, covering about 80 percent of performances, roughly 800 a year, against the 5 percent that previously had an open-captioned show. By the article's publication on 9 September 2019, about 900 people had used the glasses, an average of two to three per performance. The article quotes an audience member it does not name: 'I haven't been to the theatre for 30 years; at last I can go back to the theatre again'. The source publishes no satisfaction survey and no per-season booking figure.
blooloop.com
Who
Shanghai Customs (上海海关), with officer Ding Ning (丁宁) of the Shanghai Exhibition Centre customs office and Han Jianyong (韩建勇), head of that office's 3rd exhibition-goods supervision section
What they did
At the 4th China International Import Expo (进博会), customs officers began walking their inspection round of the booths wearing AR glasses. Looking at the exhibit, the officer sees its country and name in the display ('目光所及之处就能看到展品的国籍、名称等相关信息'); the gaze locks onto the QR code stuck to the display case and the product information appears at once. The glasses show the work instruction as text and video, give voice prompts, photograph the step on a voice command and generate the report by speech to text. The article also records that a three-level command centre watched the roaming officer's first-person feed in real time. Customs itself describes the outcome as a paperless round (实现了巡馆工作的无纸化).
What came out of it
Ding Ning, in the article: '用了智能眼镜顷刻间便能了解到展台上的展品信息，监管更加方便快捷了，效率大大提高' (with the smart glasses you can know the booth's exhibit information instantly, supervision became more convenient and quicker, and efficiency rose a lot). The report, published on 5 November 2021, says in its own text that this was Shanghai Customs' debut with AR glasses and digital tags at the fair, and it carries no measured figure for time or for items inspected. Capabilities the article lists in the device's spec sheet but does not show in use, such as edge computing and infrared temperature measurement, stay out of what this case claims.
www.jiemian.com
Who
Maiyue Technology (迈越科技股份有限公司) and the Thai buyer Yongsheng International Business Management (Bangkok) Co., Ltd. (泰国永盛国际商业管理(曼谷)有限公司)
What they did
At the 22nd China-ASEAN Expo (17 to 21 September 2025), Maiyue exhibited AI glasses that project teleprompter text in real time and do simultaneous interpretation between Chinese and the ten languages of the ASEAN countries, a function aimed at negotiating right at the booth.
What came out of it
The China News Service report, published on 20 September 2025, states with the formula 据悉 (it is understood) that the Thai company Yongsheng has already signed a purchase agreement with Maiyue for 1,000 pairs of AI glasses: '泰国永盛国际商业管理(曼谷)有限公司已与迈越科技股份有限公司签署采购协议，采购1000副AI眼镜'. The source does not say where or on what date the agreement was signed, and this case does not claim it was at the fair. Huang Yuyang (黄宇阳), Maiyue's market department manager, in the same report: '我们希望用技术解决实际问题' and '东盟国家语言多样，正是人工智能可以发挥关键作用的领域'. There is no account of the 1,000 pairs being used afterwards, which is why this case enters as an announced order.
finance.sina.com.cn

Devices used

Talk to us

Back to the use cases