TCL

TCL
Information
Industry	Consumer electronics, Augmented Reality
Founded	1981 (as TTK)
Founder	Li Dongsheng
Headquarters	Huizhou, Guangdong, China
Notable Personnel	Li Dongsheng (Chairman)
Products	Televisions, displays, smartphones, AR glasses
Parent	TCL Technology
Website	https://www.tcl.com

TCL is a Chinese consumer electronics company best known for televisions and display panels, and one of the larger entrants into the Augmented Reality glasses market. The group traces back to 1981, when it was founded by Li Dongsheng in Huizhou, Guangdong as an audio cassette maker under the name TTK; it adopted the TCL brand in 1985, and the listed parent renamed itself from TCL Corporation to TCL Technology on 7 February 2020. Beyond its core display and television businesses, which include the panel maker China Star Optoelectronics Technology (CSOT), TCL has built a presence in wearable displays and smart glasses, first under its own TCL NXTWEAR label and later through RayNeo, an AR-focused brand it incubated.

TCL's earliest XR products were tethered display glasses sold under the NXTWEAR name, beginning with the NXTWEAR G in 2021. In 2021 the company also established RayNeo, described as an AR innovator incubated by TCL Electronics, which has since become the public face of TCL's Smart glasses and AR efforts. By Counterpoint Research's accounting, RayNeo ranked as the number one AR glasses brand worldwide by shipments in the third quarter of 2025, with roughly a 24.5 percent share, holding the top spot for a second consecutive quarter.

History

The company was founded in 1981 by Li Dongsheng and a partner in Huizhou as a maker of audio cassette tapes, under the name TTK. After a trademark conflict with the Japanese tape brand TDK, it rebranded to TCL in 1985, initials that originally stood for Telecom Corporation Limited and that the company later reinterpreted for marketing as "The Creative Life." Over the following decades TCL grew into one of the world's largest television manufacturers and, through CSOT, a major producer of LCD and OLED display panels. On 7 February 2020 the listed entity changed its name from TCL Corporation to TCL Technology.

TCL entered the wearable-display space at CES 2021, where it showed a "wearable display" concept, and then brought the idea to market as the TCL NXTWEAR G, announced around Mobile World Congress 2021. The NXTWEAR G was a pair of tethered glasses that used dual Micro-OLED panels to project a large virtual screen from a connected USB-C device, with no battery or significant compute of its own. In 2021 TCL Electronics also established RayNeo as a dedicated AR brand, and the two have since shared product lines: some viewing-glasses models carry both the TCL and RayNeo names.

At CES 2023, TCL unveiled the TCL RayNeo X2, which it presented as one of the first pairs of glasses with binocular full-color Micro-LED optical waveguide displays, alongside the TCL NXTWEAR S viewing glasses for the United States market. The X2 marked a shift from simple media glasses toward standalone Augmented Reality, running its own Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and supporting features such as gesture recognition, navigation, and real-time translation. RayNeo subsequently expanded across two families: the lightweight Air series of media viewing glasses and the X series of full-color AR glasses, culminating in the RayNeo X3 Pro in late 2025 and the Air 4 Pro shown at CES 2026.

Technology

TCL and RayNeo build two broadly different kinds of glasses. The first are tethered viewing glasses, sold under the NXTWEAR and RayNeo Air names, which use Micro-OLED birdbath-style optics to place a large floating screen in front of the wearer. These models carry no battery or main processor and instead draw power and video from a connected phone, laptop, or console over a USB-C DisplayPort connection, which keeps them light: the NXTWEAR S weighs about 89 grams and the RayNeo Air 4 Pro about 76 grams. Their panels have advanced quickly, from the 1080p-per-eye, 60Hz Sony Micro-OLED screens in the early NXTWEAR glasses to brighter, 120Hz HDR10 dual-layer Micro-OLED displays in the Air 4 Pro.

The second kind are standalone AR glasses in the RayNeo X series, which use full-color Micro-LED optical engines paired with diffractive waveguides rather than birdbath optics. This approach lets the displays be far brighter (TCL cited up to 1,000 nits on the X2 and RayNeo quoted up to 6,000 nits peak on the X3 Pro) while keeping the lenses closer to ordinary eyeglasses, at the cost of a narrower field of view, around 25 to 30 degrees. These glasses run their own Qualcomm Snapdragon silicon (the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 on the X2 and the Snapdragon AR1 platform on the X3 Pro) and add cameras, on-device tracking, and AI assistants. As one of TCL's parent businesses is the panel maker CSOT, the group has positioned AR display technology, including Micro-LED, as an extension of its broader display expertise.

Products

TCL's XR catalog spans tethered display glasses sold under the TCL NXTWEAR and RayNeo Air names and full-color AR glasses in the RayNeo X series. The table below lists notable models.

Product	Year	Type	Notable specs and notes
TCL NXTWEAR G	2021	Tethered display glasses	First product; dual Micro-OLED panels, 1080p per eye, 47-degree FOV, 60Hz; ~140-inch virtual screen; USB-C; no battery
TCL NXTWEAR S	2023	Tethered display glasses	Dual Micro-OLED, 1920x1080 per eye, 45-degree FOV, 60Hz, 400 nits; ~130-inch virtual screen; 89 g; USB-C; about 399 US dollars
TCL RayNeo X2	2023	Standalone AR glasses	Announced at CES 2023; binocular full-color Micro-LED waveguide, 640x480 per eye, up to ~1,000-1,500 nits, ~25-degree FOV; Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1; 16 MP camera; crowdfunded around 700 US dollars
RayNeo Air 2	2023	Tethered display glasses	Sony Micro-OLED, 1080p per eye, 120Hz, 600 nits; ~76 g; ~201-inch virtual screen; USB-C media glasses; about 379 US dollars
RayNeo X3 Pro	2025	Standalone AI + AR glasses	Full-color Micro-LED diffractive waveguide, 30-degree FOV, ~3,500 nits typical and up to 6,000 nits peak; Snapdragon AR1 platform; 12 MP Sony sensor; Gemini AI; about 1,299 US dollars (1,099 early bird)
RayNeo Air 4 Pro	2026	Tethered display glasses	Shown at CES 2026; dual-layer Micro-OLED with HDR10, 0.6-inch panels, 120Hz, 1,200 nits peak; ~201-inch virtual screen; Bang & Olufsen-tuned speakers; ~76 g; 299 US dollars

Market position

In its consumer-electronics core, TCL is consistently among the largest television makers in the world, and through CSOT it is a major supplier of display panels. In the much smaller AR glasses segment, its RayNeo brand has emerged as a leading player: Counterpoint Research credited RayNeo with the number one position in global AR glasses shipments in the third quarter of 2025, at roughly 24.5 percent share, the second straight quarter it led the market. RayNeo competes most directly with other lightweight-glasses makers such as Xreal, with the two brands offering both birdbath media glasses and, increasingly, waveguide-based AR models.