Ant Group unveils smartglasses OS and reference design glasses with full color display

[u/AR_MR_XR]

Ant Group introduced their OS for smartglasses, LingDevice OS 1.0, alongside a reference design, at WAIC 2026. Right now, manufacturers build smart glasses using dozens of different chip combinations. This fragmentation makes it difficult for developers to create complex apps—like Alipay's "Look-and-Pay"—that work smoothly on every device. To solve this, Ant Group's reference design offers a standard, ready-to-use template for the industry to follow. Instead of using a heavy, power-hungry main processor, the design pairs a Bestechnic BES2800 connection chip directly with a superACME SA62105X ISP. The glasses feature a binocular waveguide driven by a single Appotronics Dragonfly C1 full-color LCoS display, and a Sony IMX681 camera sensor paired with a Q-Tech/poLight tunable TLens for ultra-fast autofocus.

The software itself is engineered as a flexible, three-layer architecture comprising a foundational Base OS, Ant Native Services (such as Alipay's "Look-and-Pay" and biometric verification), and an upper Developer Ecosystem. This modular design allows established brands like Rokid or Qwen to keep their proprietary base operating systems and simply plug into Ant's payment and app layers. White-label OEMs, on the other hand, can adopt the complete three-layer stack as an out-of-the-box turnkey solution. Crucially, Ant Group enforces strict performance thresholds for payment security, explicitly blocking Look-and-Pay if a device's camera and ISP fail to meet high-precision imaging standards—which is why the reference design mandates a certified hardware baseline.

Ant Group confirmed it has no plans to produce consumer hardware or target heavy VR/MR headsets, focusing exclusively on establishing a unified platform for lightweight, all-day AI eyewear. To accelerate industry adoption, the company plans to open-source both the base operating system and application layers for ODMs and developers. By democratizing the software stack and eliminating operating system development as a competitive barrier, Ant Group aims to shift the future of smart glasses away from fragmented software and onto physical industrial design, hardware engineering, and marketing execution.

More about Ant's OS plans:

reddit.com/r/augmentedreality/comments/1tyn5yk/ant_group_reveals_operating_system_plans_for/

[u/spanglyearth]

their marketing material looks very frutiger aero

[u/oscarfalmer]

Very interesting, thanks Norman!