Grand View Research estimates the global augmented reality market at $120.2 billion for 2025 and forecasts $170.0 billion for 2026, reaching $1,050.56 billion by 2033. Device shipments tell a narrower and more concrete story. IDC counted about 2.25 million display-less smart glasses in the first quarter of 2026, up 167% year over year, and forecasts $5.1 billion of revenue for that category across the full year. The two numbers measure different things, and keeping them apart is the first thing to get right about augmented reality statistics.
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Key Augmented Reality Statistics for 2026
- Global AR market: estimated at $120.2 billion in 2025, forecast at $170.0 billion in 2026 and $1,050.56 billion by 2033, a 29.7% CAGR over the 2026 to 2033 forecast period (Grand View Research).
- Smart glasses shipments: about 2.25 million display-less units in Q1 2026, up 167% year over year. Display eyewear rose 86% in the same quarter (IDC).
- Meta’s share of smart glasses shipments was 69.2% in Q1 2026, ahead of RayNeo at 3.4% and Xiaomi at 3.1% (IDC).
- EssilorLuxottica sold more than 7 million Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses in 2025 and said that more than tripled its smart glasses sales (CNBC, reporting EssilorLuxottica’s FY2025 results).
- Apple Vision Pro shipped about 390,000 units in its 2024 debut year and about 45,000 across all of 2025, having shipped none for the first three quarters (IDC estimates, via The Register).
- Mixed and virtual reality headsets were forecast to fall 42.8% across 2025 while the rest of the XR market grew 211.2% (IDC, December 2025).
- FDA AR/VR device list: 104 entries as of the December 2025 update, up from 39 in December 2022 (Exponent, reviewing the FDA Digital Health Center of Excellence list).
- Snapchat reported 493 million daily active users in Q2 2026 (Snap). In its Q1 2026 letter Snap said Lenses were used about 9 billion times a day on average.
Augmented Reality Market Size
Grand View Research estimates the global augmented reality market at $120.2 billion in 2025 and forecasts $170.0 billion for 2026, reaching $1,050.56 billion by 2033 at a 29.7% CAGR across its 2026 to 2033 forecast period. The report splits the market by component into hardware and software, and covers applications from industrial maintenance to retail try-on.
Grand View put North America at 34.0% of global AR revenue in 2025, the largest regional share, and forecasts Asia Pacific to grow fastest. Hardware took 59.0% of 2025 revenue, with software forecast to grow faster over the same window. Head-mounted devices were the largest display type in 2025 and smart glasses the fastest-growing. Industrial and manufacturing was the largest application in 2025, with healthcare forecast to grow quickest.
Selected AR and XR Market Estimates
| Measure | Figure | Later year | Published rate | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Global AR market revenue | $170.0B forecast (2026) | $1,050.56B by 2033 | 29.7% CAGR, 2026 to 2033 | Grand View Research |
| AR in retail revenue | $15.7B forecast (2026) | $105.9B by 2033 | 31.3% CAGR, 2026 to 2033 | Grand View Research |
| Display-less smart glasses hardware revenue | $5.1B forecast (2026) | $6.4B forecast (2027) | 18.9% CAGR on units, 2026 to 2030 | IDC |
| Mixed reality headset hardware revenue | $2.4B forecast (2026) | $7.1B by 2030 | 31.6% CAGR on value, 2026 to 2030 | IDC |
| AR/VR apps, services and related spending | Nearly $12B forecast (2025) | No later-year figure published | 19.7% growth forecast for 2025 | IDC |
Each row is the publishing firm’s own estimate or forecast on its own definition. The rows are not additive and the market rows overlap the device rows.
Why Two AR Numbers Can Both Be Right
Grand View’s $170.0 billion figure and IDC’s $5.1 billion figure are produced on different definitions, so neither one contradicts the other and neither divides cleanly into the other. Grand View sizes an industry: hardware and software sold into every application it tracks. IDC sizes a device line: the revenue attached to shipments of display-less smart glasses, counted alongside separate lines for mixed reality headsets and for AR/VR apps and services.
Take a figure from the wrong frame and the error is large. Sizing the AR opportunity off IDC’s device revenue understates it by leaving out everything sold as software. Sizing the smart glasses business off Grand View’s market total overstates it by many multiples. Check which definition a number came from before putting it in a model.
Smart Glasses Shipment Statistics
Smart glasses carry the unit growth. IDC reported that display-less smart glasses, the camera-and-audio category Ray-Ban Meta defined, grew 167% year over year in Q1 2026 to about 2.25 million units. Display eyewear, which covers AR, VR and mixed reality devices with screens, grew 86% in the same quarter.
Demand is concentrated in one partnership. EssilorLuxottica reported selling more than 7 million Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses in 2025, which it said more than tripled its smart glasses sales, and named them the main driver of second-half wholesale growth. The company had sold roughly 2 million in total between the October 2023 launch and February 2025. The lineup includes the Ray-Ban Meta refresh, Oakley Meta HSTN, Oakley Meta Vanguard and the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display, the first in the family with a heads-up display, sold with a wrist-worn neural band. In June 2026 Meta added an own-branded line, Meta Glasses, starting at $299, built with EssilorLuxottica but carrying neither the Ray-Ban nor the Oakley name.
Smart Glasses Vendor Share
IDC put Meta at 69.2% of the smart glasses market in Q1 2026. RayNeo took 3.4% on lower-cost display glasses, Xiaomi 3.1% on China volume, Viture 2.5% after expanding US retail, and XREAL 2.0% ahead of its Android XR push. The remaining 19.8% is spread across everyone else, which is a long tail for a category this young. IDC’s smart glasses share table covers vendors selling display-less and display models, so it is broader than the display-less shipment count above.
Share figures from different quarters are not directly comparable, because the device groupings behind them differ. IDC reported Meta at 60.6% of AR/VR headsets plus display-less smart glasses in Q2 2025, and 75.7% of XR overall in Q3 2025 with Quest headsets included. Read the category label before comparing two of these numbers.
Shipment Forecasts Through 2030
IDC forecasts 13.6 million display-less smart glasses in 2026, worth $5.1 billion, rising to 27.3 million units by 2030, and publishes an 18.9% unit CAGR for that window. Average selling price is forecast to fall from $376 to $229 across the same period.
Optical see-through display glasses, the ones that put an image in front of your eye, are what IDC calls the fastest-growing XR segment, at a 41.9% unit CAGR, reaching 12.2 million units by 2030. Mixed reality headsets are forecast to go from 3.2 million units in 2026 to 10.4 million in 2030, a published 34.4% unit CAGR. All three categories are forecast to grow. Only display-less glasses start from a base above 13 million units.
Apple Vision Pro Statistics
Apple shipped about 390,000 Vision Pro units in 2024, the headset’s first year, which IDC valued at roughly $1.4 billion. IDC put 2025 shipments at about 45,000 units for the whole year. Apple shipped none of them in the first three quarters, having halted manufacturing, and resumed only with the M5 model in October. The Financial Times, citing IDC, reported that assembly partner Luxshare halted production at the start of 2025, and Sensor Tower estimated that Apple’s digital advertising spending on the device fell by more than 95% over the course of 2025 in markets including the US and UK.
Apple refreshed the headset with the M5 chip in October 2025, adding a faster processor, longer battery life and a new band, and held the starting price at $3,499.
What Analysts Report About Apple’s Headset Roadmap
In June 2026, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported that Apple had canceled the Vision Pro 2 and the lighter Vision Air and moved the team to smart glasses. Kuo expects AI smart glasses in 2027 and display-equipped AR glasses no earlier than 2029. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, quoted in the same report, dates the shelving of the Vision Air to October 2025 and the cancellation of Mac-paired display glasses to January 2025, and has separately reported a version in which a Vision Pro successor remains in testing while the category is paused. Apple has announced none of it.
Either reading points the same way on timing. The premium head-worn roadmap at Apple has slipped past 2026, which is the scheduling fact worth carrying into any AR forecast built this year.
Headsets Versus Glasses
In December 2025 IDC forecast that mixed and virtual reality headset shipments would fall 42.8% across 2025 while the rest of the XR market grew 211.2%, with total XR device shipments up 41.6% to 14.5 million units. Those were year-end projections rather than final results.
Price separates the two halves. Meta’s entry smart glasses start at $299 and look like eyewear. Vision Pro starts at $3,499. The unit numbers follow that gap, and so does the software opportunity that sits on top of an installed base.
Mixed Reality Forecasts
Headsets are still forecast to grow. IDC expects mixed reality to go from 3.2 million units and $2.4 billion in 2026 to 10.4 million units and $7.1 billion in 2030, a published 31.6% CAGR on value, with average selling prices in the $682 to $742 band. IDC ties those steady prices to the enterprise and prosumer audiences the headsets serve.
AR in Retail and E-Commerce
Retail publishes specific results, because merchants measure conversion. Shopify’s case data covers named stores rather than category averages. Rebecca Minkoff added 3D models and AR to more than 50 product pages and found shoppers who viewed a product as a 3D model were 44% more likely to add it to cart, and those who viewed it in AR were 65% more likely to buy. Gunner Kennels, which lets shoppers place a life-size dog crate next to their pet, reported cutting its return rate by 5%.
Survey data points the same way. A March 2026 Clutch survey found that 58% of consumers have made a purchase after using AR features and that 54% said they were likely to increase their use of AR and VR over the following two years.
Retail AR Market Size
Sized separately, AR in retail is a fraction of the total AR market and carries a higher published growth rate. Grand View Research puts the segment at $11.2 billion in 2025 and $15.7 billion in 2026, reaching $105.9 billion by 2033, and publishes a 31.3% CAGR over its 2026 to 2033 forecast window. Hardware held around 45.0% of 2025 revenue and North America 35.0%. Grand View forecasts virtual try-on as the fastest-growing application.
Read those segment forecasts with more caution than the shipment data above. Retail AR spans everything from a try-on widget to an in-store installation, and the boundary each research house draws is a judgment call rather than a shipment count.
AR in Healthcare
Healthcare is the one segment where AR reaching a market is recorded by a regulator. The FDA’s Digital Health Center of Excellence maintains a public list of medical devices incorporating AR or VR. Reviewing the December 2025 update, Exponent counted 104 entries, against the 39 the agency published in December 2022, an increase of about 167%. Most were cleared through the 510(k) pathway, with two De Novo authorizations.
Those entries include surgical planning and navigation systems, medical image viewers, pain therapy devices and vision-correction tools. The FDA notes the list is not exhaustive, since it is assembled largely from terms appearing in public decision summaries, and the agency has continued to add entries since that update.
What the FDA List Does and Does Not Tell You
An entry on the list means a device met the applicable FDA premarket requirements for its indication. It does not mean the device is reimbursed, widely bought, or clinically superior to the alternative. For the same reason, the list is a better guide to which AR applications have cleared a regulatory bar than to how much AR hospitals are running today. For the current and complete listing, the FDA publishes it on its own site.
AR in Manufacturing and Enterprise
The enterprise headset most associated with industrial AR is being retired. Microsoft ended HoloLens 2 production and, as set out in its published lifecycle guidance, will provide only critical security and regression fixes until 31 December 2027. Microsoft has not announced a successor.
Organizations that standardized on HoloLens 2 for remote assistance, field service, design review or training are running a platform inside a published end-of-life window. The alternatives on sale are Meta’s business tier, Android XR devices from Google’s hardware partners, and a set of smaller vendors. Each of those requires its own device management and its own content port, so a migration is a project rather than a purchase.
Consumer AR Adoption
Consumer AR runs mostly through phone cameras. Snap reported 493 million daily active users and 971 million monthly active users in Q2 2026, with revenue up 19% to $1.60 billion.
Snapchat AR Statistics
In its Q1 2026 investor letter, Snap said more than 75% of Snapchatters engage with augmented reality every day on average, and that its community used Lenses in the Snapchat camera about 9 billion times per day on average. Developers submitted more than 400,000 Lenses in that quarter, up more than 150% year over year, which Snap attributes to AI-assisted Lens creation.
Snap has hardware coming too. It announced SPECS in June 2026 at $2,195 with a $200 refundable deposit, expected to ship in fall 2026 in the US, UK and France. The glasses weigh 132 grams in the 47mm size, run a 51-degree field of view at 7 milliseconds motion-to-photon latency, and get up to four hours of mixed use per charge with 20 hours total from the case. Snap says developers have already published hundreds of Lenses for the device.
AR Gaming
Scopely closed its $3.5 billion acquisition of Niantic’s games business, which includes Pokemon GO, Pikmin Bloom and Monster Hunter Now, on 29 May 2025. Lifetime player spending for the title is widely quoted, but the published estimates differ by billions depending on whether web-shop purchases are counted alongside app store revenue, so no single figure is reproduced here.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Big Is the Augmented Reality Market in 2026?
Grand View Research forecasts $170.0 billion for 2026, up from an estimated $120.2 billion in 2025, and projects $1,050.56 billion by 2033 at a 29.7% CAGR. Hardware was 59.0% of 2025 revenue and North America 34.0%.
What Are the Smart Glasses Shipment Figures for 2026?
IDC forecasts 13.6 million display-less smart glasses for full-year 2026, worth $5.1 billion. About 2.25 million shipped in the first quarter, up 167% year over year.
What Are the Published Apple Vision Pro Shipment Estimates?
IDC estimated about 390,000 units in 2024 and about 45,000 across all of 2025, with nothing shipped in the first three quarters of that year. Apple has not published unit sales for the product.
Is the Apple Vision Pro Discontinued?
Apple has not announced a discontinuation and the M5 model is still listed at $3,499. Ming-Chi Kuo reported in June 2026 that the Vision Pro 2 and Vision Air were canceled and the team moved to smart glasses, with AI glasses targeted for 2027. That is an analyst report, not an Apple statement, and other reporting differs.
Which Company Leads the Smart Glasses Market?
Meta, with 69.2% of smart glasses shipments in Q1 2026 per IDC. RayNeo (3.4%), Xiaomi (3.1%), Viture (2.5%) and XREAL (2.0%) follow.
How Much Does AR Improve E-Commerce Conversion?
Published results are merchant-specific rather than universal. Shopify reports that Rebecca Minkoff shoppers who viewed a product in AR were 65% more likely to buy, and that Gunner Kennels cut returns by 5% after adding AR sizing.
How Many Entries Are on the FDA AR/VR Medical Device List?
Exponent counted 104 entries at the December 2025 update, against 39 in December 2022. The list covers devices incorporating AR or VR, not AR alone, and the FDA says it is not exhaustive.
Notes on the Figures
All dollar figures are USD. Estimates and forecasts are labeled as such throughout, and each carries the forecast window its publisher used. Different firms use different base years and different forecast windows, so their CAGRs are not interchangeable and their market totals are not additive.
Device categories are counted separately and should not be summed without checking the definition. “Display-less smart glasses” means camera and audio glasses with no screen. “Display glasses” and “optical see-through glasses” put an image in front of the eye. “Mixed reality headsets” are enclosed head-mounted devices. Market sizings that cover “augmented reality” as an industry include software and applications that none of those device counts touch.
Last updated: 23 October 2026. For related market work, see our Enterprise AI Market Map and Healthcare AI Market Map.
About the author
Editorial Staff
The Editorial Staff at Bot Memo is a team of writers, analysts, and AI agents dedicated to mapping the global AI startup ecosystem. Led by Chintan Zalani, the team tracks thousands of funding rounds, classifies companies across verticals, and distills it all into actionable intelligence for investors and founders.
