Samsung has been quietly cooking up smart glasses since 2023, and at MWC 2026 in Barcelona, executive vice president Jay Kim finally let some details slip to CNBC. Not everything — Samsung isn’t that generous — but enough to understand what the company is actually building.

Here’s the confirmed bit: the glasses will have a camera positioned at eye level. That camera feeds what you’re looking at directly to a connected Galaxy smartphone, which handles all the processing and sends useful information back to you. The glasses are the eyes; your phone is the brain.

Glasses as the eyes, phone as the brain

It’s a smart way to keep the hardware light without compromising on capability, and it’s essentially the same approach Meta took with the Ray-Ban glasses — which currently own a majority of the smart glasses market, so the playbook clearly works.

What Kim wouldn’t confirm is whether the glasses have a built-in display. When pressed, he pointed to Samsung’s watches and phones for anyone needing a screen — which is about as close to a “no” as you’ll get without actually saying it.

A separate report suggests a display-equipped version might arrive in 2027, making this year’s model more of a camera-and-AI-first experience.

Will there be a display?

The bigger pitch is what the AI actually does with what it sees. Samsung wants the glasses to catch you glancing at a restaurant menu and translate it, look at a landmark and tell you its history, or quietly handle tasks — booking, messaging, navigating — without you fishing your phone out of your pocket.

Qualcomm and Google have been in the room since 2023 helping build the chips and software to make that happen.

As for when all this actually lands, Kim said Samsung wants something out for industry this year, and Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon echoed the same 2026 commitment at the same event. A specific date? Still anyone’s guess — but given how much Samsung showed its hand at MWC, it probably isn’t far off.