Wearable technology

Wearable technology, also called wearables or wearable computing, is the category of electronic devices designed to be worn on the body, either as accessories, embedded in clothing, or held close to or on the surface of the skin. The devices typically contain microprocessors, sensors, a battery, and wireless connectivity, and they detect, process, and transmit information such as movement, location, and physiological signals. Common examples include smartwatches, fitness trackers, hearables, smart clothing, and the head-worn displays used for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).

Head-mounted displays and smart glasses are themselves a form of wearable technology, and most VR and AR systems are built around body-worn components: a display worn on the head, controllers or gloves worn on the hands, and, increasingly, sensing bands worn on the wrist. As a result the extended reality (XR) industry overlaps heavily with the broader wearables market, and devices such as the Apple Vision Pro, the Meta Quest line, and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are routinely counted as wearables alongside watches and fitness bands.

Definition and scope

Definitions of wearable technology vary in their boundaries, but most agree that a wearable is an electronic device worn on or near the body that collects or displays data and communicates with other devices or networks, usually over Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or a cellular connection. Devices are often "always on" and hands-free, and many use embedded sensors such as accelerometers, optical heart-rate sensors, and gyroscopes to monitor the wearer or the surrounding environment.

The researcher Steve Mann, who built wearable computers from the early 1980s onward, framed wearable computing around the device being constant (always running and ready), augmenting the wearer's senses, and mediating their interaction with the world rather than being a tool picked up for a single task. That framing maps directly onto AR head-worn displays, which sit on the augmented side of the reality-virtuality continuum and alter what the wearer perceives while remaining worn throughout use.

History

The lineage of wearable technology predates the consumer industry by decades, and several of its earliest milestones were head-worn or directly tied to display research that later fed into VR and AR.

One widely cited starting point is a small analog computer built in 1961 by mathematician Edward O. Thorp and information theorist Claude Shannon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. About the size of a pack of playing cards, it was worn at the waist with foot-switches concealed in a shoe for input and a hidden earpiece that signalled predictions through musical tones; it was designed to predict the landing octant of a roulette wheel and gave its wearer an estimated 44 percent edge. Guinness World Records recognises it as the first wearable computer.

In 1968, Ivan Sutherland and his students at Harvard and the University of Utah built the first head-mounted display, nicknamed the Sword of Damocles after the ceiling-mounted mechanical arm that supported and tracked it. The display rendered simple wireframe graphics registered to the wearer's head movements and is generally regarded as the first VR and AR head-mounted display.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Steve Mann designed and built a series of general-purpose wearable computers that combined a head-mounted display visible to one eye with cameras, audio, and biofeedback hardware. His systems, and the wearable computing research group he helped establish at the MIT Media Lab, popularised both the term "wearable computing" and the practice of mediating vision through a head-worn camera-and-display rig. Mann is frequently described as the father of wearable computing.

The consumer wearables market emerged in the 2000s and 2010s with fitness trackers and smartwatches, and AR returned to public attention with products such as Google Glass. The categories converged again in the 2020s as VR headsets, AR smart glasses, and wrist-worn input bands all became mass-market wearable products.

Categories

Wearables are usually grouped by where they are worn and what they do. The categories below are the ones most commonly listed; the XR-relevant types are described in more detail in the following section.

Category	Worn on	Typical function	Examples
Smartwatches and smart jewelry	Wrist or finger	Notifications, apps, payments, health and fitness sensing	Apple Watch, Oura ring
Fitness and activity trackers	Wrist, chest, or head	Step, heart-rate, sleep, and workout tracking	Fitbit bands, chest straps
Hearables	Ear	Audio, voice assistants, hearing assistance	Wireless earbuds, AI hearing aids
Smart clothing	Body	Embedded sensors for movement or biometrics	Sensor garments, smart shoes
Body-mounted and medical sensors	Skin or body	Continuous physiological monitoring	Continuous glucose monitors, ECG patches
VR and AR head-mounted displays	Head	Immersive or overlaid visual displays	Apple Vision Pro, Meta Quest headsets
AR smart glasses	Head	Camera, audio, and optional in-lens display	Ray-Ban Meta, smart glasses with heads-up displays
XR input and haptic wearables	Wrist, hands, or body	Gesture input and tactile feedback	EMG wristbands, haptic gloves and suits

Relationship to virtual and augmented reality

The connection between wearable technology and XR runs in both directions: the head-worn displays that define VR and AR are wearables, and the wider wearables industry increasingly treats XR hardware as one of its product categories.

Head-worn displays and smart glasses

A VR head-mounted display is a wearable that encloses the wearer's field of view with one or more internal displays, while an AR or mixed reality device overlays rendered content on the real world, either optically or by passing camera video through to internal screens. The Apple Vision Pro, released in February 2024, is a head-worn mixed reality computer that feeds video from external cameras to two internal displays. Lighter augmented reality glasses, such as the Ray-Ban Meta line, package cameras, microphones, and speakers into an eyeglass form factor; the Meta Ray-Ban Display model, announced in 2025, added a small in-lens display, making it a wearable heads-up display rather than camera-and-audio glasses alone.

Wrist-worn input: EMG wristbands

A more recent class of XR wearable is the surface electromyography (sEMG) wristband, which senses the electrical activity of forearm muscles to infer finger and hand movement and turns those signals into input commands. Meta first demonstrated an sEMG wristband prototype paired with its Orion AR glasses at Meta Connect in September 2024, and published peer-reviewed results on the approach in the journal Nature on 23 July 2025, reporting gesture and handwriting recognition that generalised across people without per-user calibration. The company shipped a consumer version, the Meta Neural Band, on 30 September 2025, bundled with the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses at a starting price of 799 US dollars. Because the band reads muscle signals at the wrist, it lets the wearer make small finger gestures with the hand at rest and does not require the hand to be in a camera's view.

Haptic gloves and suits

Haptic wearables deliver touch feedback for VR and AR. Vibrotactile devices, such as the bHaptics TactSuit vest, use arrays of small vibration motors to signal events like impacts; the TactSuit X40 carries 40 motors across the torso. Force-feedback gloves go further by physically resisting finger movement: the HaptX Gloves G1 provide more than 130 points of feedback per hand through hundreds of microfluidic actuators and apply up to 40 pounds of resistive force, so a wearer can feel the shape and texture of virtual objects. The Teslasuit combines full-body haptic feedback with motion capture and biometric sensing in a wearable suit aimed at training, healthcare, and research. These devices are worn on the hands or body and are among the more specialised wearables, used mainly in gaming, training, and research rather than mass consumer settings.

Market and current status

Wearables are a large and growing consumer-electronics segment. Market research firm IDC reported that global wrist-worn device shipments grew 10.5 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2025, led by Huawei and Apple. Smartwatches account for the largest single share of wearable shipments.

Within that market, XR headsets remain a smaller but distinct category. The smart-glasses subset in particular grew quickly after the Ray-Ban Meta glasses outsold Meta's expectations; the company's chief technology officer called them a bigger hit than anticipated, and Meta restructured its Reality Labs division into separate "Metaverse" and "Wearables" groups, with the wearables group focused on smart glasses. Apple has been reported to be working on its own smart glasses as a longer-term competitor. As of mid-2026, the dominant XR wearables in the market are standalone VR headsets such as the Meta Quest 3, the mixed reality Apple Vision Pro, camera-and-display smart glasses led by Ray-Ban Meta, and the wrist-worn Meta Neural Band sold with them.