The most exciting AI wearable at CES 2026 might not be smart glasses after all
Exclusive: Memories.ai's wearable pin is now more lightweight and records for longer. But there's a bigger story to tell here.
Memories.ai
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ZDNET's key takeaways
- Memories.ai is launching Project LUCI at CES.
- It builds on the prior LUCI pin, with memory storage and quick processing at the core.
- It is available for developer preview; full availability is expected later in 2026.
Even before CES 2026 officially kicks off, one of ZDNET's predictions for the biggest trends is already taking off: AI wearables.
Memories.ai unveiled Project LUCI (Long Understanding Contextual Intelligence), a research prototype designed to lay the foundation for AI wearables that people actually want to use and wear. Developers can utilize the device to create their own AI wearables, ready to deliver value to customers.
Also: CES 2026: Everything we're expecting to see (and how to watch)
If the name sounds familiar, it is because, prior to Project LUCI, the company exhibited the LUCI Pin at last year's CES. However, at the time, it was a concept demo geared toward consumers, which has now pivoted into developer-focused hardware.
"After seeing several high-profile AI wearables fail, we realized that the space still needed a lot of maturing, so we pivoted LUCI from a consumer device to a system-level reference design for other smart wearable companies to test, build, and experiment on top of our large visual memory model (LVMM), a platform that gives AI the ability to remember like humans," said Shawn Shen, the company's co-founder and CEO, to ZDNET.
How it works
At the heart of what makes the reference platform stand apart from its competitors is its durable memory layer, powered by Memories.ai's Large Visual Memory Model (LVMM).
According to Memories.ai, competitors that have developed AI wearables, including AI pins, pendants, and glasses, have failed in the past due to their inability to deliver on memory, resulting in responses that aren't truly catered to or helpful to the user.
"Failed AI wearables typically captured data without understanding it. LUCI does a better job of understanding your life the way humans do, visually, contextually, and continuously," said Shen. "Whether it's remembering people you meet, turning daily life into meaningful video highlights, or providing full real-world context to AI agents, LUCI delivers real utility from day one."
Also: Why the AI wearable market is set to grow by 10x - and it's not just new gadgets
With Memories.ai's LVMM 2.0, the company aims to address this issue by converting the continuous video captured by the pin into structured on-device encoding frames, which can be used to index and reference them in what the blog post refers to as a "sub-second search and recall."
Developers can then use LUCI to tweak specifics such as battery trade-offs, latency, privacy controls, UX patterns, and more, with LUCI already available as the baseline. It is available for developer preview at CES, with full availability expected later in 2026; you can reserve it now.
LUCI Memories.ai
"This is akin to Google's Nexus strategy, to putting out developer-focused hardware that showcases their Android software and helps push the ecosystem forward," added Shen.
Part of this plan involves working with leading AI wearable companies, including Rokid, Sharge, and RayNeo, to integrate Memories.ai's technology into their devices, according to Shen.
How's the hardware?
A major component of Project LUCI is, of course, the actual pin.
If you were familiar with it from last year's CES, it retains the same form factor, featuring a sleek square design and a magnetic clasp. Other components include a wide-angle camera with a 109-degree field of view, a privacy switch, and a weight of under 45 grams, supporting up to two to three hours of continuous recording.
"LUCI is not just a device, it's a system. It consists of lightweight hardware (the LUCI Pin), a companion mobile app, and, at its core, a real-time world model that encodes the physical world into structured visual memory. This allows LUCI to understand people, events, and context over time, not just respond to commands," said Shen.
Safety
With AI wearables that constantly capture user data, a common concern among users is what happens to that data, how it is stored, and whether it will be used in the future for training.
Also: 5 popular wearable devices that are sharing your private data (and the safest brands to buy from)
Shen told ZDNET that this is also a core concern for the company and that it is being addressed by working with "leading cloud providers" and following "best practices to ensure enterprise-grade data security, encryption, and access control across the entire system."
He also shared that Memories.ai is working closely with Qualcomm to enable a fully on-device experience, which would allow all of the visual memories to be stored and processed locally, giving users an extra layer of privacy.