Xiaomi

Xiaomi
Information
Industry	Consumer electronics
Founded	April 6, 2010
Founder	Lei Jun
Headquarters	Beijing, China
Notable Personnel	Lei Jun (founder, chairman and CEO)
Products	Smartphones, IoT and lifestyle products, electric vehicles, VR headsets, AR and smart glasses
Website	https://www.mi.com

Xiaomi (Chinese: 小米; from the word for "millet") is a Chinese consumer electronics company founded on April 6, 2010, in Beijing by Lei Jun together with a group of associates. Lei Jun, a former president of the software firm Kingsoft, serves as its founder, chairman and chief executive. The company is best known for smartphones and a broad ecosystem of internet-connected lifestyle products, but it has also been an early and recurring participant in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality hardware, ranging from low-cost phone holders to standalone headsets and AR glasses prototypes.

Xiaomi went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in June 2018, raising roughly 4.7 billion US dollars. By 2024 it had become the world's third largest smartphone vendor behind Samsung and Apple, shipping about 168 million handsets for roughly a 13.6 percent share of the global market. It was also the fastest growing of the major brands that year, the only one of the top three to gain market share while Samsung and Apple slipped. The company also makes personal computers, smart-home and IoT devices, wearables, and, more recently, electric vehicles.

History

Lei Jun founded Xiaomi in 2010 and built the business around low-margin hardware tied to software and internet services, an approach that quickly made it one of China's largest phone makers and earned it the nickname "China's Apple" in the Western press. The company's first move into immersive hardware came in August 2016 with the Mi VR Play, a budget smartphone holder positioned as a competitor to Google Cardboard. Over the following years Xiaomi expanded into standalone VR and then into AR and smart glasses, often using major trade shows such as MWC to demonstrate prototypes rather than to launch finished consumer products.

A turning point came at CES in January 2018, when Facebook (now Meta Platforms) announced that Xiaomi was the manufacturing partner for the global Oculus Go and that Xiaomi would sell its own version, the Mi VR Standalone, exclusively in China. Both headsets ran on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 Mobile VR Platform and shared the same core hardware, with Xiaomi localizing Oculus Store content for its Mi VR Store through the Oculus Mobile SDK.

Virtual reality products

Xiaomi's VR efforts began with inexpensive phone-based viewers and culminated in the standalone Mi VR. The Mi VR Play (2016) and its successor the Mi VR Play 2 (2017) were lightweight fabric headsets that held a smartphone behind a pair of lenses, sold for token prices (the Play 2 launched at about 14 US dollars) and aimed at budget-conscious users. The Mi VR Standalone, announced at CES 2018 and released in China around May 2018, was Xiaomi's only self-contained VR headset. Functionally identical to the Oculus Go, it used a Snapdragon 821 chip, a fast-switching LCD panel and a three-degrees-of-freedom motion controller with a touchpad and trigger.

AR and smart glasses

From 2021 onward Xiaomi shifted its public attention to smart glasses and Augmented Reality. In September 2021 it revealed the Xiaomi Smart Glasses, a 51 gram concept that used a tiny 0.13-inch MicroLED display, about the size of a grain of rice, to project a monochrome image into the right lens through an etched optical Waveguide. The concept packed nearly 500 components, including a quad-core ARM processor, a 5 megapixel camera, microphones and a speaker, and was pitched for navigation prompts, real-time translation and call alerts rather than as a shipping product.

At MWC in February 2023 Xiaomi showed the Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition, a tethered AR prototype that connected wirelessly to a phone for distributed computing. It weighed 126 grams, used dual Micro-OLED panels behind free-form light-guiding prisms with about 58 pixels per degree and up to 1,200 nits of brightness, and added electrochromic lenses that could darken into a blackout mode so the device could also act as a VR display. It ran on a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 platform with Snapdragon Spaces support and offered onboard optical Hand tracking for selecting and navigating apps; Xiaomi presented it as a concept rather than a product with pricing or a release date.

In June 2025 Xiaomi launched its first shipping wearable in this space, the Xiaomi AI Glasses, at its "Human x Car x Home" event. Following the template set by the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, the AI Glasses carry no display and instead rely on voice and touch to drive Xiaomi's Hyper XiaoAi assistant. They weigh about 40 grams and include a 12 megapixel camera with electronic image stabilization, five microphones (four plus a bone-conduction mic), two open-ear speakers and a silicon-carbon battery rated for around 8.6 hours of mixed use. The glasses launched in China starting at 1,999 yuan (roughly 280 US dollars), with electrochromic-lens versions priced higher, and added Alipay QR-code payments.

Product timeline

Product	Year	Type	Notes
Mi VR Play	2016	Smartphone VR viewer	First Xiaomi VR device; fabric headset positioned against Google Cardboard; China beta drew about 1 million sign-ups
Mi VR Play 2	2017	Smartphone VR viewer	Lighter redesign with open-ended phone holder; fits 4.7-5.7 inch phones; launched at about 14 US dollars
Mi VR Standalone	2018	Standalone VR headset	China-only counterpart to the Oculus Go; Snapdragon 821; fast-switching LCD; 3DoF controller
Xiaomi Smart Glasses	2021	AR smart glasses (concept)	51 g; 0.13-inch MicroLED into a waveguide; monochrome; 5 MP camera; navigation and translation
Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition	2023	Wireless AR glasses (concept)	126 g; dual Micro-OLED at ~58 PPD, up to 1,200 nits; Snapdragon XR2; hand tracking; electrochromic lenses
Xiaomi AI Glasses	2025	AI smart glasses	Display-free Ray-Ban Meta rival; 12 MP camera; 5 mics; Hyper XiaoAi assistant; from 1,999 yuan in China

Market position

Within the VR and AR industry Xiaomi has acted less as a dedicated headset maker and more as a large electronics manufacturer experimenting at the edges of the category. Its most consequential contribution was manufacturing the Oculus Go for Facebook, one of the first mainstream standalone VR headsets, while its own Mi VR Standalone stayed confined to China. In AR, the company has repeatedly used prototypes such as the Smart Glasses and the Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition to demonstrate display and optics technology, then translated that work into the shipping Xiaomi AI Glasses, entering the fast-growing display-free smart glasses market alongside Meta. Xiaomi's scale in smartphones and IoT gives it manufacturing reach and a built-in ecosystem that few standalone AR startups can match.