Sector · Tourism
China put the guide inside the glasses. Some places put a sign on the door
Museums and heritage sites are where tourism glasses actually run, and almost all of it is Chinese. The other half of this page is the places that ban them: San Francisco bars in 2014, and every public deck of an MSC ship since July 2025.
A guided tour has two constraints that never go away: the guide speaks one language at a time, and the thing you came to see is often no longer there. A 5,000 year old city is a field of foundations. A cave mural is behind glass in the dark. Glasses answer both by putting the missing part back on top of what is left, in whatever language the visitor reads.
This is a Chinese sector, and it is not close. Rokid has been running AR guidance at the Liangzhu archaeological site in Hangzhou since October 2020, where recognising a jade disc triggers the overlay and ruined buildings are shown restored. At Dunhuang, China Mobile Migu built a monocular SLAM guidance system for the Mogao Caves in which a digital host walks visitors through a 1:1 replica of Cave 285 with mural detail restored across ten caves. Fliggy, Alibaba's travel arm, rents the glasses at partner sites; the coverage says Rokid worked with 51 museum and exhibition projects in 2021, and cites a reach of around 50 million visitors, a figure that mixes site visits with AR content and should not be read as 50 million people wearing glasses. Jiangxi's Sanqingshan project is an announcement, and is filed here as one.
Two problems that are not the exhibit
Japan used the same hardware for a different shortage. KDDI's au Visual Guide runs on Snapdragon Spaces so one app covers several headsets, and Zentan Bus Company uses it so a single human guide anywhere in Japan can lead visitors through a town remotely, with multilingual subtitles and sign language. That is a staffing answer, not an exhibit.
The other problem is the menu you cannot read. SUPERHEXA built live speech translation into its AR glasses with about 500 ms end to end across 11 languages, and iFLYTEK sells 40 g glasses with four translation modes, 122 online languages and 18 offline. Both of those descriptions come from the companies and their cloud vendor, not from an independent test, and the iFLYTEK material was timed to a travel season. At the other end of the price scale, an open source project called OpenGlass clipped a 25 dollar camera board onto ordinary frames and did sign and object reading well enough to collect 4,100 stars before being folded into its successor.
The sign on the door
Tourism is the one sector where the wearer is a stranger in someone else's room, so it is also the sector with the longest ban list. In 2014 at least twelve San Francisco bars and three in Oakland posted signs against Google Glass after a wearer said she was attacked in a Lower Haight bar; that episode gave the word Glasshole its meaning and is still the template. On 16 July 2025 MSC Cruises banned devices able to record covertly, naming smart glasses, from every public area of its ships: pool decks, lounges, dining rooms, theatres, casinos. They are allowed in your own cabin and ashore. The reason given is the one that matters, and it is not about image quality: a phone held up is visible, and glasses are not.